Discover more from The Digitizing Report
This week’s feature addresses a question I hear all the time: what’s the best way to digitize a collection of old transparencies or strips of negatives? Not surprisingly, this has a few different answers, depending on needs and budget.
I want to briefly review the major options, then give you a quick look at the tools and techniques that have evolved here to handle client projects.
My first stop in what turned out to be an unexpectedly deep dive was just scanning with my existing tools; with any flatbed that has slide backlight, one can do a pretty decent job. Quick shout-out to Ed Hamrick of VueScan - he has single-handedly rescued millions of perfectly good scanners from dumps and thrift-shop shelves, bringing them back to life after computer and scanner manufacturers abandoned them. I first discovered it a decade ago when Apple killed TWAIN, and have never looked back. If you scan, just get it… very worth the $50 or $120 depending on which version fits your needs!
The downside of flatbed scanning slides and negs, however, is that it is tedious… although there are some machines that are specifically made for that and do an excellent job (the Epson V850 in particular, as well as the serious Creo iQsmart that has a devoted following). My attention shifted to scanners made specifically for slides, including stack loaders and other tempting niceties.
The canonical favorite of this breed is the Nikon Coolscan series, still much loved despite being FireWire and long out of production (I have the 4000 with loader). In addition to doing one thing very well, it introduces Digital ICE.. a marvelous feature that does a second scan with an infrared, off-axis light source. This detects dust and scratches, with the software inpainting afterwards to smooth these over. This is far from perfect, but is easy and can sometimes be magical. I have the comparable USB Plustek 8300, and have used it often (with VueScan, not the provided Silverfast that requires separate license for every scanner you have).
The problem with all these in a digitizing biz, though, is that people bring in boxes of old photos, and even the dedicated machines seem to run about 3 minutes each with variable results. I want RAW with full dynamic range, as well as an efficient workflow that doesn’t have me twiddling my thumbs while a machine runs (unless I can actually go do something else entirely… the ultimate labor-saving device is still another human being). I should note that any system can be refined enough to fit some applications… even inexpensive desktop units like the Kodak Slide ‘n Scan can produce serviceable results for a family project… but I did not yet feel like I had found the tool that would fit our business model.
Somewhere in there, my latent interest in professional archiving coupled with the endless quest for digitizing power tools led me to a well-known resource in the field… The DAM Book by Peter Krogh. This focuses on shooting slides and negs with a proper digital camera, and takes a deep dive into all aspects of Digital Asset Management. The online communities for this approach had a satisfyingly geeky flavor, and there is an excellent Facebook Group. This was starting to look like the right kind of tool, fast and capable, with no intrinsic gotchas.
The Slide Station
First, a disclaimer. Every time I think I have this fine-tuned, something comes along to teach me a lesson — the battle with ancient E2 Ektachrome as it selectively fades to red, unmounted film sizes that require anti-Newton-Ring glass or other fixturing tricks, software issues with Sony cameras or MacOS, Lightroom learning curves, an interesting WTF forum post, or the OMG mess of not having hands scrupulously clean when handling a soft film brush. This part of the lab is more a lifestyle than a workstation, always evolving.
Let’s take a quick look at the machine itself, then the basic technique of using it for one common use case.
This beast lives next to a dedicated M1 Mac Mini, and it has a small filtered air compressor on a shelf to help with dust. The main structure is a Kaiser copy stand; I like their design, with a nice structure for rotating the camera when I want to shoot something hanging on a wall. There are lots of competing alternatives, including the new Pro Riser MK3 from Negative Supply, and I was just chatting with a guy in the group about cobbling one with a lab microscope stand (very limited height range and pitch adjustment needs to be locked down, but would be great for 35 on a budget).
The objective is a non-wobbly way to hang a camera at a stable perpendicular location relative to a platform, with easily repeatable height settings for different types of film. A color-accurate light source is parked on the platform, atop which are fixtures for holding slides as well as unmounted positive or negatives of various sizes. This part can get addicting and expensive, but there are tricks… I use dedicated carriers for the sizes I encounter most often (35mm and 2-1/4), then ad-hoc methods for everything else (even Kodak Discs - remember those?).
One particularly nice unit from Negative Supply is the 35mm negative Pro Film Carrier… the box at rear in the photo above. This has slots that hold the negs flat over the light, with the knob engaging the edge to feed it through. This really simplifies full-length rolls of negatives.
Large format negatives can be tricky, but are well worth the effort. Holding them flat on a heat source introduces dynamic curl, so they need to be captured, but flat glass in contact with the shiny side is likely to cause Newton rings (where distances approach visual wavelengths and generate multicolored rings). There's a special glass for this which looks slightly frosted and costs a fortune, but is worth it. I've sandwiched many an odd duck between that and a piece of optically clear glass on the emulsion side where that is less likely to be an issue.
The backlight claims to have a color rendition index (CRI) of 99, and the Sony camera is equipped with a Sigma 70mm f/2.8 Macro Art lens… uniform from corner to corner.
Running a Batch
This is on the hot list for a video, to be produced with our lovely little studio… the text below is just a very quick zip through the highlights, without addressing any of the many interesting twists along the way.
To prepare for a session, I set the camera height to a known level (38.5 cm for 35 mm slides), turn it on, and launch Sony’s horrible Imaging Edge Remote software at exactly the right moment. If I hold my breath and bite my lip jussst right, the Sony software will see the Sony A7iii camera and all will go well.
Lightroom cannot be running during this step, nor can anything else related to images. The forums are full of lore for dealing with this including how high the count between powering up the camera and launching the app, but once connected, it is rock solid and works well. Once there, I open Lightroom, confirm the client file destination, then set up filename prefix and starting sequence number.
To get things ready, I insert a slide and switch temporarily to autofocus. Usually this will snap into place, though it sometimes needs a nudge to get to full size… easy to fix with camera-height twiddling. I then switch back to manual, fine tune to confirm but I have a little range around critical focus, and production can begin.
The capture process involves inserting a slide emulsion up (to mirror later in software), blowing off any dust, tweaking exposure with help from the histogram, hitting “1” on the keyboard to shoot (I need a foot pedal), and repeating. My personal habit to keep it fun is to do small batches, switching between capture and edit. I should note that I am constantly watching that focus, especially on mixed batches where the mount or emulsion thickness changes between slides. Touching the barrel switches to close mode in the Sony window, and I focus on the grain… not the visual image.
With negatives, it's different fixturing but the same basic process.
Editing in Lightroom is a separate topic, but I have two favorite add-on tools worth mentioning here.
First, the Loupedeck is a thing of beauty. Instead of groping for tiny sliders in the Lightroom window while squinting in the darkness, I use actual knobs. This is comfortable and quick, with layout so familiar that I rarely have to give it more than a glance. Each can be clicked to reset if I’ve wandered into the weeds, and this smooths the workflow.
Second, NegativeLab Pro is magic. This Lightroom plugin is for negs, as the name suggests — there is a lot more to inversion than just flipping the curve, and this tool goes deep with all sorts of tricks (some of which are a bit unstable, like batch processing). It carries the white balance sample into the negative domain, although once converted, the knobs on the Loupedeck no longer behave logically… but it’s easy to pop back into NLP if you need to fix something.
NegativeLab Pro has an interesting secret weapon, which helps with the nasty problem of old red Ektachrome E2 slides. These are a major pain to edit, but if you flip the curves to make it a neg, then convert back to positive with NLP, it gets closer to a proper palette… usually good enough to fix the rest of the way in Topaz Photo AI. In the picture above (with thanks to client Erik H), the image on the left is an accurate scan of an 2-1/4 glass-mount Ektachrome from the 1950s. The one in the middle is basic color balance fix, and the one on the right is the process described above. Nothing else has been done to tweak colors. It's far from perfect, but goes a long way toward recovering images that look better in black and white.
Since a big range of blue-green dye has faded to near-zero, we’re not just tweaking hue and color. I am amazed that there is enough information buried in the red to extract any separation at all. Here is another example from 1959, although I did this one with VueScan and a bit of manual tuning:
Off to the Gallery
Finally, I should mention what happens to all this. The files created in the Lightroom Library are RAW with their edits in the Catalog sitting inside my computer… which is about as useless to the client as can be imagined. So when I complete a run, I immediately do an export to high-res JPEG, with those folders parked in the file system next to the RAW scans.
I copy these over to the NAS, then move to my main machine and upload the JPEGs to a SmugMug gallery for the client. Everybody gets a folder there, and this lets them enjoy the process while a job is underway, download images, and share with family… with a few occasional affiliate nickels if anybody chooses to order prints (that has yet to offset the annual SmugMug pro account cost, but it's a nice service).
When the job is done, all the files (RAW, JPEG, and contact sheets for quick reference to the collection) get copied to a thumb drive that is then tagged and delivered to the client.
One might argue that RAW files are ugly and huge… unlikely to be used by many clients. They certainly don’t reflect the beautiful edits I have done (at least white balance and tweaks to rescue things buried in the blacks or blown out in the whites… along with spot-fixes where bits of dust and hair are too annoying to leave). But my theory is that I won’t live forever, my NAS may be inaccessible, my quick edits are by no means authoritative, and a family member might someday want to Photoshop that perfect shot of grandfather on the ferry. So we provide those 50 mb files that are closest to the source, even though they are cumbersome. At the very least, it creates a multi-site backup!
That's it for this week. I realized while writing that we need to go multimodal as soon as possible… there are countless bits in there that are way more subtle than a quick article can cover, and a video would allow me to show the details. Substack embeds YouTube very elegantly, so we’ll return to this one!