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

Yea this is definitely a setup issue. Everything looks soft in his DSLR scans, probably an issue with the depth of field. I used to DSLR-scan 6x8 medium format and while it was a major PITA the results were phenomenal [1,2]. With stitching and a high enough magnification you can easily pull up to 800 Megapixels or more out of medium format frames. Without a 1:1 magnification (while the lens was able to magnify 1:1, my setup wasn't able to accomodate the focus distance adequately so I was more in the ballpark of 1:1.8 or 1:2) I was able to stitch frames into 300+ Megapixel images with about 16 or 20 individual images making up the mosaic.

The key to great DSLR scanning is a proper, high-quality light table (I built my own) and a high quality macro lens (high quality != expensive). Adobe Lightroom always worked best for stitching, Adobe Photoshop and others had some issues for some reason. Cleaning dust off as much as possible before taking the mosaic images is vital to reduce post-processing time.

If you've got a good workflow and don't have to scan hundreds of frames a week it's a great process that's a great deal cheaper, gives better results than even drumscanning if done properly and can be faster than having a lab scan it for you.

Here's an example of a 6x8 DSLR scan. Taken with a 20MP Sony DSLR with 60mm (90mm FF equiv) macro lens by Tamron. Downsampled to 13MP image resolution from the 300+MP scan mosaic because that original mosaic file was about half a gigabyte in size. 1: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...

Here's one taken as a single frame with the Sony DSLR without any stitching. 2: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...

These are excellent results (albeit files are slightly overly compressed). Thank you for the insights!

> high-quality light table

What light source did you use?

> Lightroom worked best for stitching

Time to blow dust from my Autopano Pro license! (Yes, it still works on macOS 15.1 on Apple Silicon).

> albeit files are slightly overly compressed I agree, pretty sure the host upload is at fault here.

> What light source did you use A simple LED strip light, you know those flexible ones. They were glued on the inside (just the bottom panel) of an aluminium box 30x40x8cm and then a frosted acrylic panel was placed on top. While the light color is not that important I chose a neutral white. But I reference each scan images white balance from a reference image of the light table so it gets compensated anyway. Worked like a charm when I still shot analog. Gone digital now unfortunately as the costs just rose too quickly as a college student. Still miss my Fuji GX680 sometimes, but I'm also really happy with my Fuji X-Pro 2.