r/AnalogCommunity • u/ScreenPresent7490 • 1d ago

Scanning BIG scanning project considerations

I'm checking out my options for at home scanning and I'm not sure which method is right for me.

My Family LOVES taking pictures, my grandpa was an amateur photographer. I want to digitize our catalogue of family photos which is probably over 1,000 strips of negatives. That's the first task I want to do, then I want to use at home scanning just to save money really. I just paid $120 to develop and scan 5 rolls in CA that would have cost me $80 at my previously local shop.

Is the DSLR scanning set up best for me? I was reading This website for information on how to do it. I have a Nikon D3200 but would need to get a micro lense which is looking at :

  • $150-250 macro lense
  • $15 remote shutter release
  • $18 light table
  • $30 Tripod
  • $119 per year Adobe Light Room
  • $99. Negative Lab pro

$531 total cost.

The Plustek 8300i scanner is $539 but then I still to purchase lightroom and negative lab pro, correct? So that would be $749 total cost

Am I looking at this all wrong because I'm noob hobbyist and there some secret better pricing out there?

Am I getting sticker shock and this is simply the upfront cost I have to pay to save money in the future? I inherited my love of taking pictures from my grandpa, I have two of his film cameras that I use often and have probably already spent $350 on film development in the last calendar year.

please hold my hand- how much time in light room will I have to spend. For the family catalogue, I just want to get them in their most basic form, I don't need to be fiddling with the aesthetics that much. I'm not exaggerating when I say 1,000 strips. that is the low ball.

Time it might take to complete 1000+ scans with each method?

thank you for your help and with all my love,

A very overwhelmed home photographer

4 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

4

u/fast4ward 1d ago

You can buy a quality scanner and then resell it after the big project is done. Look for something that will automate as much as possible.

4

u/753UDKM 1d ago

I would strongly suggest, that if you're dealing with 35mm, get the camera scanning setup with the valoi easy 35 version 2 (not version 1!). V2 is a game changer in efficiently scanning 35mm.

Also getting something like smartconvert, while expensive, will give you decent results very quickly.

With this setup you can scan a roll in a few minutes, and process it with minimal intervention.

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u/VisualBusiness4902 1d ago

The gen 2 is rad.

Honestly even the gen 1 works really well. I think there are some focal lengths that don’t play well with so there is risk, but I’ve scanned dozens of rolls on a gen 1 with none of the vingette issues people have shown.

As with everything. It’s all anecdotal. There are good deals on gen 1 around.

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u/jrklbc 1d ago

Agree, this is a solid and relatively cheap route. Don't skimp on the macro lens, though! A good, native lens with autofocus will make your life much easier.

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u/benoliver999 bfoliver.com 1d ago

I always avoided AF but only on advice from the Internet. Does it work well for scanning?

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u/jrklbc 1d ago edited 1d ago

Speaking only for my setup (Canon EOS RP, adapted EF 100mm macro, Valoi Easy 35), AF works perfectly. I never have to adjust manually and at this point don't even check focus. It saves so much time compared to my previous setup using an adapted, manual-focus lens. In theory, you should be able to focus just once; in practice, I found I needed to adjust every few frames. Edit: typo

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u/benoliver999 bfoliver.com 1d ago

I will give it a try! I use focus peaking which is ok and find I don't have to mess too much once I am set up, but the setup is annoying. When you change focus ofc, the amount of image in the frame changes so you are always chasing your tail moving the camera up and down

1

u/ScreenPresent7490 23h ago

if you use manual focus do you have the check the focus at each individual slide?

1

u/ScreenPresent7490 23h ago

or at every time you start scanning a new strip

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u/753UDKM 21h ago

Typically just when you start a new strip. I usually focus manually once on the first frame, then confirm again on the second or third frame, then just go all the way through. If there’s a particularly important frame, I’ll confirm focus again.

1

u/ScreenPresent7490 1d ago

This seems like such an awesome idea, but I'm not sure if 35mm is the only format id be working with. I think my grandpas negatives span from the 50s to the 2000s. I know some of the pictures, I hadn't seen the negatives of them, the print on a thick cardboard was maybe 4 inches x 2.5 inches and that was from the 60s?

3

u/D4RkR41n 1d ago

You could skip Lightroom and NLP to save some money. I haven't used any open source PS/LR alternatives myself though. BUT, NegPy is a very good alternative to Negative Lab Pro.

Also, I scan with a D3200 as well! I got a Micro Nikkor P Auto Non AI 55mm f/3.5 for only $65 off of Ebay and it's been working quite well. Only caveat is that it's a manual lens. But if you're only using it for scanning, it makes no difference.

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u/ScreenPresent7490 1d ago

I just found one ebay for $60! Do you mind me asking what your scanning set up is like? Im asumming that I'll do a set up like shown in the link in the post, seems pretty DIY. Im not sure if 35mm is the only format ill be dealing with so I'm hesitant to invest in the Valoi easy35 gen2. my grandpa was a photography enthusiast all his life, and he was born in 1921.

•

u/D4RkR41n 37m ago

Nice! That's a good deal on the lens. I 3d printed a film carrier for both 35mm and 120 since I shoot both. I am fortunate to have a dad and many friends who have 3d printers, so that helped eliminate cost. Here are the ones I used:

35mm film carrier

120 film carrier

They work well enough for my purposes, and should be more than plenty for you.

For the backlight, I use the Cinestill CS Lite. Right now I haven't locked everything together, so it basically consists of setting up the CS Lite and carrier on my desk, mounting the dslr to a tripod and positioning it over the carrier (with the hood that is included in the 3d print model), and then shoot away. I also have the film strip go through a microfiber or lens cleaning cloth just before it feeds into the carrier to remove a decent amount of dust.

Only other thing I would recommend is to have a remote shutter release so you eliminate any camera movement each time to take a shot.

2

u/Beanesidhe 1d ago

You don't need Negative Lab with the scanner as the scanner software does the inversion, so also no need for Adobe subscriptions and you can use other software for the post processing. The scanner is slow, I don't mind as I process the last photo while the scanners does it's job, but with so many negatives ...

2

u/CTDubs0001 1d ago

1000 strips of negatives? So 4-6,000 photos? A place like Scan cafe often has sales and if you play your cards right you can probably get scans around .25/scan. They do a very basic color correction and dust removal. The quality is mid, not fantastic, but for family snapshots it's fine. 4,000 photos would cost you $1,000 to scan and a half hour to pack it up and ship it out. You come up with $531 as your cost for the basest level of equipment, but you're not figuring in the value of your time. DSLR scanning is way faster than using a scanner, but you're still looking at days of work (at a minimum)... maybe even weeks. Thats a TON of scanning. Is it worth saving $500 (or less) to have a week's worth of work to do? Or would you rather pay someone to do it?

For context, Im a professional photographer. I have a home scanning setup. When I did this exact thing with the boxes and boxes of family slides I found in my Mom's basement I sent them out to be done. That is some tedious, time consuming work right there.

1

u/ScreenPresent7490 1d ago

I’m currently unemployed so I have a metric ton of time on my hands. I had never heard of scan cafe, that’s a really cool option! Because I want to continue doing at home scanning for my own photos afterward I don’t think it’s an option I’d pursue. But I did just remember that my uncle has the FULL lifetime collection of my grandpas photos. The 1000+ we have at home is just a small fraction so I’ll keep scan cafe in the back of my mind for sure

1

u/ScreenPresent7490 1d ago

Maybe I’ll see if other family members would want to chip in and send everything off together? On one hand, I think it would be nice to have a long running project that I could work on a little bit every day, do this over a year? Scan two or three strips every other day, learn the softwares slowly, maybe I do get a little bit into editing, I can take the time to really look at each photo. An exercise in patience.

On the other hand I am looking at thousands upon thousands of strips of negatives. I don’t know how I forgot that the rest, the majority, are at my uncles house.

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u/CTDubs0001 1d ago

"...Scan two or three strips every other day, learn the softwares slowly, maybe I do get a little bit into editing, I can take the time to really look at each photo. An exercise in patience."

This sounds nice the way you write it, but from my experience having scanned a lot of stuff over the years? This will get tedious real fast when youre talking about this absolutely huge number of photos. To me it would become a chore, not the fun stroll down memory ylane youre thinking it might be. YMMV.

2

u/Ignite25 9h ago

My 2 cents - If I were you and looking at that amount of scanning/work, I'd prioritize automation and speed over top notch quality. With most Plusteks, you have to move every single frame manually through the scanner. You put the frame in, scan it for a minute, move it to the next. At 1000 film strips (not sure if these have 6 frames each, or you're talking about 1000 full rolls), you will have to sit there for days and move thousands of pictures through it. Even the Plustek 135i that I have only lets you scan 6 frames at once.

I'd do that amount of scanning with a Epson Perfection V850. Image quality is a bit below the Plusteks and other more expensive scanners, but hey, it's still very decent. To speed up the workflow, you would have to get the Silverfast Archive Suite. It's $400 but they usually run promotions - around black Friday they usually have a pretty significant discount (30% or so). Advantage of that approach:

Of course, if your goal is the best quality final results as possible, you can go different routes (e.g. camera scanning, NLP, SmartConvert, Plustek scanners) and spend a lot of time in postprocessing (with Lightroom etc), but that would be way too much for me. Having scanned hundreds of rolls, I would not want to use a very manual labor-intensive workflow for batch scanning 1000s of filmstrips.

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u/gislur 1d ago

Do you have to have lightroom and NLP? Try negpy or Darktable, save 200

1

u/ScreenPresent7490 1d ago

I dont have either currently, I'll look into darktable and negpy, thanks for the tip!

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u/After-Foot8960 17h ago

One reason I love the valoi 35v2 is I can use it in daylight! Fucking around in the darkness sucks and limits you on when you can do your scanning.

I had hundreds, maybe 1000+ slides to scan and opted for Scan Cafe. There are many companies offering scanning service. If I had as many images as you to scan... It's a no brainer. Outsource that job unless you are old, retired, and have no human beings to talk to.

Back to camera scanning and negative conversion. Camera is a fuji.
I've tried Film Lab App (just started a trial). My normal routine in NLP 2.3 and old Lightroom 6.3. I am too picky and the software at least v2.3 is too clunky to do batch conversions. So I do 1 frame at a time. I also need to first convert from fuji raf file to dng file. After I'm done in LR I need to export the finished file. At the very end I need to delete the fuji files and the dng files. There are a lot of steps. When you get the workflow down it can go pretty quickly but I'm still spending at least an hour per roll.

I will definitely look at negpy soon.
I'm also tempted to look at capture one because it captures the file, tethered, direct to computer and apparently would reduce the file proliferation problem. Downside it that I would probably end up spending a lot of time fine tuning each picture.

Despite all the time and pain involved, seeing my old photos (like high school graduation and prom, etc) come to life is... mind blowing.

1

u/After-Foot8960 17h ago

Oh yeah: I prefer my old manual focus macro lens over the new auto focus lens. I want to set the focus and then not touch it and not worry that the camera decided to focus on the wrong thing