Scanning With a Camera

[pflower]

My venerable Polaroid Sprintscan 120 cannot survive much longer, so I have been experimenting with "scanning" with a Sony A7RIV with the 90mm macro lens.  So far the results are promising but I have a few questions.

1.  Although I expose the negative to give a wide histogram - making sure not to clip at either end - when I do a simple "invert" in Photoshop the immediate result seems very overexposed with the histogram pushed far towards the right hand side.  I have to do a very dramatic levels adjustment to get a properly exposed positive image.  Given that the histogram on the negative has a much wider range of values, I find this surprising.  Any thoughts as to why this should be?

2.  I am only interested in scanning 6x6 B&W negatives.  Has anyone used Negative Lab Pro on B&W?  A quick trial is impressive but does it give anything better than inverting and then adjusting with levels in Photoshop?

3.  Shooting 6x6 negatives in their entirety means that I am wasting a lot of the A7R's frame.  Although the cropped 16 bit  Tiffs are still 180MB in size I wonder whether it is worthwhile looking at making a couple of exposures and stitching them.  The camera is static on a copy stand, so I would need some method of moving the negative carrier precisely.  I suppose a straight edge to move it against would work but does anyone have any suggestions how to move the negative carrier precisely so as to be able to stitch?

Thanks

[langier]

As I age, I'm having less patience in using my scanner to digitize both old negatives and transparencies and now use a light table, micro lens and one of several digital bodies.

Shooting negatives with a digital camera is quick and easy to do but then one must spend a little effort to swap the tones into positive. There's probably an action for Photoshop out there but I'm too lazy to take a look...

You can get you image close in ACR if you invert the tones using curves and tweaking the color and then export it as a 16-bit grayscale image and that should work well. You can also do your basic tonal adjustments keeping the image as a negative and then do your flop in Photoshop and then add a B&W adjustment layer, thus keeping the image as RGB and 16bit which may allow more adjustment/fine tuning later. As always YRMV... I'd do a search on YouTube and see what's out there and what may work well for you.

Depending upon how large of print you are planning, 6x6 on a full-frame camera is tossing about 33% of the sensor's real estate. The image on a Sony 7IV should be just fine giving you 40mp+ with which to work and the ability to print a 20x20 inch print at 300 dpi with pixels to spare. That's probably close to what you got from your Sprintscan and maybe even better (and much, much faster!) Even a 24x24-inch print should look great with this size file.

I've shot a lot of historic 4x5 and larger film and glass negatives using 36mp and the files print nicely and quite large, at least up to 30x40.

I showed a colleague how to do this a couple of years back since he needed to find a quick and inexpensive way to digitize and print his archives. His work was being scanned on a drum and the cost per file was just too much per image for him for the bulk of his collection. We took a couple of representative negatives and shot them on my light table then converted/processed the files and printed them as 30x40s. He was quite pleased with the prints and realized that only when the prints needed to go larger would he really need much more.

Generally, the only time I'll shoot and stitch is to take a painting or other flat art that's long or tall and needs to be reproduced at full size, such as a 24x48 or larger. Otherwise, save the time and effort and enjoy bringing your archives back into the new world and a new life with a single frame and crop.