Critique How to optimise film scan?

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dancook

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I used up the rest of the film in an old OM1 and got it processed today, the photo colour is quite rich - but when I scan it, it loses the rich tones and I now see grain. The lighting in the last photo was quite poor :) but it's my wife.. and I couldn't leave her out in favour of my colleagues heh

Any tips on how to get a good scan?

Photos are mostly unprocessed, scanned, imported into LR - rotated then exported as jpg

Scanned Film Photos by dancook1982, on Flickr

Scanned Film Photos by dancook1982, on Flickr

Scanned Film Photos by dancook1982, on Flickr
 
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Tintin124 said:
What resolution did you scan them at?
Click to expand...

1200 dpi, came out at 130mb tiffs - by default there was an unsharpen mask option set to medium. Maybe i should disable that.

There's a descreening for fine prints too - maybe try that.
 
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It's an epson all in one printer/scanner, I had the prints developed in boots - I wonder whether stumping up £2 for the disc will be more worthwhile in the future.
 
I haven't used Boots for scanning but I would think that generally scanning them yourself would be better. I actually really like these, the colours look good and they definitely look 'filmie'.

Andy
 
dancook said:
I used up the rest of the film in an old OM1 and got it processed today, the photo colour is quite rich - but when I scan it, it loses the rich tones and I now see grain. The lighting in the last photo was quite poor :) but it's my wife.. and I couldn't leave her out in favour of my colleagues heh

Any tips on how to get a good scan?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what film you actually used, but, to be honest, the colours in these look quite good, a bit like Kodak Portra, a film known for its natural skin tones.

The grain that you're seeing is more likely some sort of digital noise.

If you want the best scan of your photographs, then scanning prints will not be the way to do it; you or the lab would need to scan the negatives themselves. Obviously high street joints like Boots offer this (in fact, they've already scanned these once to print the photographs) and they have fantastic scanning equipment, but they often don't have staff skilled enough to consistently turn out good scans. For this reason, most folks on this forum scan their negatives themselves, which gives them ultimate control of the look of their images.


dancook said:
Photos are mostly unprocessed, scanned, imported into LR - rotated then exported as jpg
Click to expand...

It is almost impossible to have a scan; whether a negative, slide, or print; look good straight from the scanner; scanning is the weakest link in hybrid film/digital photography. Scans will almost always require some adjustment and sharpening to get close to what's in the original photograph.
 
I agree, scanning from prints is a last resort. As RJ says, Boots (or whoever) will have scanned the negatives to make the prints, so if you get the CD you're definitely ahead compared with scanning the prints. Often scans from Boots and the like are over-sharpened, but they should generally get the orange mask colour correction pretty right; this can be hard for home scanning from colour negative film. I use Photo Express in Hull for most of my 35mm C41 (sadly they don't do E6, black and white or 120). They do a 50p per film discount for TP members, only charge £1 for return postage, and give you a really excellent 2000 dpi scan, enough for most purposes.

For me, scanning to TIFFs is a waste of disk space in most cases; the JPEGs are usually fine for quite a bit of manipulation in post, if saved at reasonably "fine" quality. I've just found an image I scanned at 1800 dpi (around 4mp altogether); the JPEG was 2.6 MB and the TIFF was over 23 MB. Yes, you get a bit of extra flexibility in post, but not enough to justify the 10-fold increase in disk space, IMHO. It would be different perhaps, for a "prize" image that I wanted to do a lot of work on in post... but that would be almost none, then!

BTW I scan 35mm E6 and black and white (and the occasional C41) with a dedicated 35mm film scanner (Plustek 7500i in my case). I also have an Epson V500 for 120, although I'm not shooting nearly enough to have justified the purchase. Avoid (like the plague) those stand-alone film scanners that simply photograph your negs and slides and save them on a card for later download; the scanner should be attached to your computer and controlled by software like Epson Scan, Vuescan (my current fave) or Silverfast...
 
Thanks guys, I will try the boots scanning service - but first I need another roll of film!
 
*shurgs* Could be a roll of Superia. The colours look ok to me, as skysh4rk said, I always make minor adjustments to the scanned image and with negatives, it is always a bit of interpretation

skysh4rk said:
It is almost impossible to have a scan; whether a negative, slide, or print; look good straight from the scanner; scanning is the weakest link in hybrid film/digital photography. Scans will almost always require some adjustment and sharpening to get close to what's in the original photograph.
Click to expand...
 
The boots scans are kinda ok, my first roll of film I got developed there, not sure they will be much better than scanning prints though. I use Ag photolab now and get medium size scan, it's a bit slow though 1 1/2 to 2 weeks to get your shots back but quality was a lot better than boots scan. I just started doing film photography and haven't been blown away from the quality of the images from a resolution and noise point of view compared to digital, however I do like the colour from film. I just tried a roll of velvia 50 as that's supposed to be the 'sharpest' colour film still waiting on getting the results back. If I keep enjoy shooting film I will probably buy a dedicated film or flat bed scanner to speed up the whole process.
 
frakius said:
I just started doing film photography and haven't been blown away from the quality of the images from a resolution and noise point of view compared to digital, however I do like the colour from film.
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While 35mm is considered a large sensor size for digital cameras, keep in mind that 35mm film is small format when it comes to film. If you're looking for significant gains in sharpness, resolution, and tonality, then I would recommend moving to medium format.

By the way, are you seeing noise or grain in your film photographs? If it is grain that you're seeing, which often is part of the charm of shooting 135, and you want to get rid of it, again, moving up to a larger film format largely takes care of this for most purposes. Because 135 format is so small, you will see more grain.

If you are seeing noise, then that likely means that something is going a bit haywire at the scanning stage or you've underexposed and are trying to boost exposure in post and are consequently creating noise. There won't be any actual noise in the film negative itself, so you must be introducing it somewhere along the line after exposure.
 
skysh4rk said:
While 35mm is considered a large sensor size for digital cameras, keep in mind that 35mm film is small format when it comes to film. If you're looking for significant gains in sharpness, resolution, and tonality, then I would recommend moving to medium format.
Click to expand...

Wot RJ said. I like the colours and subjective "look" of 35mm film compared to digital, but it's a nice 6x6 that really blows me away.
 
Yes I mean't grain rather than noise, digital lingo so ingrained......I actually picked up a mamiya c220 with the 80mm blue dot, waiting on test roll to come back. I like the rawness of film, its too easy to get obsessed with the technical aspects of photography and lose the artistic side. A large amount of the most iconic images were created on 35mm, as always its not the format or camera but what's behind it that's most important. Film right now helps me enjoy photography more, it's exciting not knowing what's coming back and been limited on how many shots you have.
 
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