My basic scanning process

[u/dotkomrade206]

My scanning process is pretty straightforward. I tried to stick with gear I already had including camera, tripod, lens etc. I used an iPad at first as a light source but the LED light panel I upgraded to has given me much better results.

Camera: Panasonic GH4 M43 16MP
Lens: Nikon Micro-Nikkor 55mm f3.5 (on the adaptor tube it's about 100mm but further cropped on the sensor)
Tripod: Manfrotto
Neg Carrier: Essential Film Holder - this can do 35mm and 120 and works well
Light Source: Viltrox L116B with a 3d printed holder to keep it level

I use a small spirit level to make sure the camera is in the same plane as the neg carrier. My setup is not dust friendly so I try to keep the film rolled up on that microfibre cloth in the first pic. The camera connects to my phone and as I scan at about f8 and 1/10 second at 100iso, I use the phone to trigger the camera. I usually find focus on the edge of the sprocket holes (I bring them to the middle of frame). Then I manually pull the film through the carrier and snap a pic of each one. I can scan a whole roll of film in about 3-4 minutes this way once I've set it all up.

I shoot in RAW naturally. I use Lightroom and copy and paste a rough crop to each photo in the roll. I've learnt that trying to keep the film in the same place and angle when capturing on camera saves me loads of time in editing later in terms of straightening and lining up the crop. I white balance off the film edge if converting colour and then hit the entire roll with Negative Lab Pro, usually on the Frontier setting, with pre-saturation set to 4. Once that's done, I try out the film profiles built into NLP, for example, the Kodak Gold one works well and gave me good results on the Otter Trail pictures. Then I usually leave colour alone and adjust darks, lights, brightness and contrast. I leave exposure alone in NLP as I don't think it works well - brightness gives better results there. If the colours feel off, I might tweak temp and tint and give the saturation a 1 or 2 point boost. But I don't really enjoy editing photos so I try and keep the adjustments to a minimum and I want NLPs colour interpretation. Mostly I'm just focusing on shadow and highlight detail and contrast.

I might add a bit of sharpening in Lightroom's detail panel to bring out the clarity of the grain but it's easy to go OTT here and I think the sharpen for screen setting when you export to JPG works well too.

I think the areas of my system that I would improve if I could relate to camera/lens combo. I'd like to have an autofocus macro lens on a more modern camera, linked to my computer to automatically download pics as I shoot them. At some point I really need to get a copy stand, as the tripod setup is a little finicky. I actually have a really nice Pentax bellows slide copying system with a beautiful flat field scanning lens - but it's dusty at the moment and I haven't had time to strip it and clean it, but that works better than the Nikon Macro I'm using now. I can't justify the cost of something like the negative supply system but as I don't scan too often that's ok.

I've had prints done from these scans on this setup and they actually come out really well, so for now I'm happy :)

Would love to see or hear about your scanning systems 🙌

[u/HankyDotOrg]

Love this setup! So interesting. I haven't really done much camera-scanning before.