September 26, 2018

Who knew scanning film could be such a long process! For the longest time, Mukul and I have been using a Canon CanoScan 9000F Flatbed Scanner to scan my 120mm and 35mm film rolls. It has been a great bang-for-the-buck scanning solution for us. The problems with this scanner is that the dynamic range is not all that great and that the resulting scans have a lot of ugly scan lines, which take a long time to remove in post. After doing a bit of research online, we found out that many people scan their film using their digital cameras these days. Apparently, it is an excellent way to get good quality, high-res digital files of your film. We decided to give this a go and purchased an LED light table (Cricut bright pad), to backlight the film and then take photographs of it. I placed a strip of film on the light table and realized that my film wasn’t flat enough, meaning it was still slightly convex or concave when laid out flat. To solve this issue, I went ahead and bought two glass pieces to sandwich the film strip and flatten it. I then went ahead and took photographs of the film with my Nikon D810 and a Sigma 105mm f2.8 Macro lens, aligned almost perfectly perpendicular to the film plane. To my dismay, there were these multiple colored, repeating oval-like patterns, called Newtonian rings, in certain parts of the image. These are formed due to moisture being trapped in between the glass pieces and the film. Also, the light from the light table had created a glow that showed up around the edges of the film photograph. To get rid of the Newtonian rings, I'd have to use anti-Newton glass to sandwich the film. The other issue that bothered me was that the colors were not very close to what this film stock should produce. To fix that, I would have to author a color correction preset.

To put it in a nutshell, the colors from the D810 were not as accurate and because of that, it took more time in post to get the colors right. In addition to that, the removal of Newtonian Rings, adds even further time in post production. (I was already unhappy with the colors so I did not bother to get that anti-Newton glass).

After a month of really painful scanning using a digital camera, Mukul surprised me with an Epson V850 Pro! It’s like he read my mind! We used this scanner to scan the film rolls this time. What we found out was that the Epson had the best results with the least amount of headache compared to scanning with the Canon CanoScan 9000F and the Nikon D810. It doesn’t give scan lines, has colors that are more spot on, making processing the images go much faster, and it gives a way higher dynamic range than either of the two previous methods. The only thing we didn’t like about it is that all the 120 film holders for this scanner can fit only two 6x7s at a time, making it take a lot more time to scan all the film. The CanoScan 9000F film holder could fit three. We also tried using that film holder to scan but VueScan, the software we use to process the film, just doesn’t want to work with it. This issue is going to affect only those who shoot a lot of 6x7 medium format film. Not that much of a deal breaker, especially considering the speed and quality boost over the other two methods.

Here are some comparisons among the three methods we experimented with (I’ve done basic processing such as exposure, white balance, curves, levels, shadows, highlights, etc., retouched all the dust and scratches from the film and made overall color adjustments--no local adjustments--to each of the images):