Scan

Scan

So you’ve got your negatives. In a day or two, I will be taking you deep into the darkroom (I’m hoping that my Alpha 7’s stellar ISO will allow me to show you exactly what goes on under the enlarger lens).

But today, we’re looking at the quick route from dry negatives to positive posting and printing. And this will be a short blog, because this bit is really simple.

You WILL need a reasonable scanner, but the good news is that you don’t need to buy anything expensive. There are four types to choose from:

1 cheap and cheerful film scanners, around £100: I have no personal experience of these, but they are clearly popular with people who have loads of negatives and slides to digitise. Built to a price, to do a decent job – I’ll be very grateful if anyone with experience of these can add a comment about how they work in practice;
2 high-quality film scanners, designed to wring the maximum quality from any negative or slide, and exemplified by the series of excellent devices that Minolta and Nikon produced a while back. Currently, Plustek seems to be the name to look for;
3 pro-grade scanners: the likes of Hasselblad are in the game, but I’ve lumped a lot of kit together in one category, on the basis that you and I don’t have the budget for them. They’re designed to scan fast and impeccably, in running-all-day environments. Some are aimed at sheer quality: others are designed to be used in processing labs where feeding a whole film in at once leads to a set of scanned images in under a minute; and
4 flatbed scanners with a second light source to allow them to scan translucent materials as well as reflective ones. My Epson V550 is in this category.



Negatives (emulsion side up) in the scanner carrier, curling up, before hte top part of the carrier is clamped down.

Once you’ve got the scanner plugged in and set up, set the resolution as high as you want it (in most cases, this will be as high as it goes!), and feed in/place the negatives. And press the button. My Epson takes 10-15 minutes to scan twelve 35mm negatives at 4800 dpi.



Carrier closed, and ready to have the scanner lid down.
One final thing, though. You won’t have a complete image yet. You will have a finished image. If you shot in soft light, or if you underdeveloped the film a little, you’ll need to increase contrast, and vice versa. So take your time in Photoshop – correct the framing, level the horizon, use Levels or Curves to get the tonal range as you want it.

And then post for Film Friday…



View of the scanner with the lid open: the dark area in the lid houses a second light source which shines through the film in the film carrier. it's large enough to scantwo strips of 35mm film, or one strip of 120 film.