My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

As someone who has built multiple custom macro film scanner setups, owns basically very consumer film scanner of note (including the Coolscan 9000 and the Minolta Scan Multi Pro), and is intimately familiar with the workings of various film scanners and science of digitizing film, I don't think this article provides particularly good advice.

Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an advertised optical resolution of 2700DPI, which means the absolute maximum megapixel resolution you can get out of that thing is a little over 10MP. Film scanners are notorious for overstating their optical resolution, which has nothing to do with the resolution of sensor used to digitize the image data and everything to do with the lens in the scanner. You can have a 200MP sensor scanning your film but if your lens can only resolve 1000DPI you will have a very high resolution image of a low resolution lens projection. It's maybe a little better than a flatbed and it features dust removal, but in the year of our lord 2024 the LS-2000 is not a good choice for scanning film.

As for his macro scanning setup, he appears to be using the digitaliza for film holding, which is a notoriously bad product with many known flaws. Negative supply makes a line of lower cost version of their very good film holders, and Valoi also offers an affordable system of components that I highly recommend. There is a ton of good information out there about macro scanning, and had the OP sought it out he could avoided his little adventure in retro computing.

Also, the LS-2000 is a noisy POS. I owned this thing for years (bought new) and put plenty of time into it. It just sucks. It was only mediocre for slides and black-&-white negatives; for color negatives it was nearly useless. You could never remove the base negative color and retain good image color. The dynamic range sucked.

I sold it on eBay years ago, then researched what might be better. The general opinion was that consumer-accessible scanning peaked with the Minolta Dimage Elite 5400 II. Of course these were long out of manufacture, but I managed to find one new in the box on a small auction site. To this day I haven't gotten around to scanning a single piece of film with it. Maybe this post will finally get me off my ass...

Digitizing film seems to be a perennial pain point. As far as I know there is no mostly-automated option to scan multiple film formats at high resolution besides paying someone with very expensive equipment to do it for you. The obsolete equipment like those models you mentioned involves a lot of fastidious labor per-frame and is generally pretty awful.

Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad film imagers for a number of reasons, a few which you already wrote. There's a huge volume of new products coming out for scanning right now (film holders, copy stands, light panels, etc) but these setups are very inconvenient to set up or, to be charitable, demand practice and perfect technique. There's always people ready to insist they have an easy convenient time setting up their SLR scanners and capturing 1000 rolls at 9999 DPI in 2 minutes. I don't share their experience.

During the pandemic I tried to proof-of-concept a path forward without any real success:

- The first attempt involved modifying a Plustek scanner to take medium format. This ended up taking a ton of work for each medium format frame (4 captures for each of the 4 quadrants, and each of those is already slow for a single 35mm frame). Stitching these captures is tedious and flaky for images that don't have obvious sharp features.

- The other involved rigging the objective of a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II on a Raspberry Pi HQ camera onto an Ender printhead to raster over the film with a light table. This could have worked but it had many mechanical problems I am not cut out to solve (lens mount, camera-to-film-plane alignment)

Leaving aside designing a proper optical path there are 2 killer problems:

- the problem of mechanically manipulating the negative and keeping it in focus

- the problem of stitching together partial captures with minimal human intervention

A few people seem to be working on open source backlit line-scanners but as far as I know no central path forward has emerged. I hope someone figures it out.

I see you mentioned using a 3D printer for scanning medium format film. I did something similar, but took the opposite approach. I placed the film on a lightbox and mounted that to the printer, then had that move around in front of a camera with macro lens. I did not have much of a problem with alignment.

That being said, this was a one-off, but once I had enough overlap with each capture, PTGui was able to switch it together relatively hands-free, even with it having lots of sky.

Very interesting. What camera/lens/lightbox did you use and around what DPI you achieve?

B&Ws also scan poorly on it if the negatives are even a little bit dense. Tricky negatives that could still produce good images in the darkroom had no hope on the LS-2000.

I've been doing something similar. I started with a 3D printer approach, then two cheap aliexpress C-beam linear actuators and finally managed to acquire a 2-axis microscope stage for cheap. The key I have found is that any issues with alignment can actually be solved with focus-stitching.

The real problem with most scanning setups is actually getting accurate color out of color negatives. The common wisdom these days is to use high-CRI light, but I believe that approach is flawed. Film scanning is not an imaging challenge, but a rather a densitometric one. You don't actually want to take a photo of the negative in a broad spectrum because the dyes in photo negatives were never intended to be used in a broad-spectrum context. You actually need to sample the density of the dye layers at very specific wavelengths determined by a densitometric standard (status M) that was designed specifically for color negative film. Doing this with a standard digital camera with a bayer sensor is... non trivial and requires characterizing the sensor response in a variety of ways.

Basically the hardware is easy, the software is hard.

You seem knowledgeable in this space. I’ve researched scanners for only scanning old prints but get mixed messages. What would be your advice on a scanner for this purpose to get 90% good enough… epson 650/700?

At a sane price? The Epsons.

https://epson.com/For-Work/Scanners/Photo-and-Graphics/Epson...

It has a white panel on the inside of the lid which ruins a lot of scans. I always put black card on top of my scans.

That's probably the best scanner for photos. And I used to own a $25K Hasselblad too.

Make sure you clean the platten and the photos before scanning to save hassle later on dust removal.

I used those Epsons for scanning tens of thousands of old photos.

Start with a good scan, and there is so much good post-processing software out there now to help correct fading etc on old images.

Wow, do you have a write up of your scanning setup? It sounds like it could work for scanning 4x5 and 8x10.

I’m also curious about your comments on the light source. Although you’re 100% correct about the way the wavelengths are specified in the data sheets, the reality has always been different. When I was printing color in the darkroom, our enlargers were very basic lights with subtractive color filters. Dedicated film scanners used either fluorescent or basic LED backlights. Have you run into color reproduction trouble that you’re sure relates to the illuminant or sensor response curves?

The other nice thing about the higher end Coolscan would have been the relative triviality of hooking up a FireWire peripheral to that Mac mini M4 shown in the pictures, or even USB with the midrange LS-5000.

Any pointers on the post-processing software? Anything to correct red-tinted slide scans?

Thank you very much for all those informations. I kind of agree. It's a nice retrocomputing adventure but that doesn't seem that efficient. But eh, we know process is very important for us film shooters, so if he enjoys, it's mission complete to me. I used to painfully scan bw negatives with Epson flat scanner 15 years ago and the experience was awful. I just bought an EASY35 from Valoi to dig backinto my films with a 70mm Macro from SIGMA on Lumix S5. So far it's very impressive. Focusing straight on the grain is a dream. Is it the setup you use now ?

Yeah, it's another one of those products that inexplicably collected cachet and reputation but was trash in reality.

I had a VCR of similar reputation, which also suffered from a noise-filled image coincidentally (the Panasonic AG-1960).

Black card is a thin cardboard , aka card stock? Can you link to something that explains the process? It’s pertinent because I’ve got a V600.

Have you used the FlexTight line of scanners? I've been able to get really great results from my Precision II.

Wow. Blast from the past. I had both the Coolscan 9000 and LS-2000.

I now use a system from Negative Supply.

Honestly, the best thing out there for color correction right now (to me) is Adobe's Camera Raw feature.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/10/14/the-adobe-adapt...

The AI denoise is fantastic, too:

https://gregbenzphotography.com/lightroom-acr/acr-17-ai-adob...

Yep! Just card stock. For some reason having a white backing behind the image causes worse scans when the bright light can penetrate the image you're scanning and gets reflected internally off that white sheet. I always just put a thin piece of black cardstock on top of everything I scanned.

Ooo I never thought about the issue of stitching blank space together. I wonder if film grain makes it trivial for the alignment algo.

I used an A7C2 + Sony FE 50mm f2.8 macro. The lightbox was a custom build based on the design that I found linked on HN recently: https://jackw01.github.io/scanlight/. This was then mounted vertically on the toolhead of my 3D printer with the camera on a tripod, I then used the Z and X axes to scan across the negative.

Although I had success with PTGui and it "just worked", I didn't fancy paying for it and instead used Hugin in the end. This lead me to take around 63 pictures with 50% overlap.

The film was a 4x5 negative and after stitching I'd say the effective DPI was ~4500