I’ve decided to start the gargantuan process of digitizing my still film negatives and slides. For much of my adult life I have been a semi-professional photographer and journalist. I started taking pictures in high school, about 50 years ago, and got my first digital camera about 12 years ago. So I have 38 years worth of b&w and color negatives and slides, in 35mm and 120 (6x6 cm) formats. I haven’t even begun a real inventory, but I estimate I have several tens of thousands of images.
Obviously, scanning every one of those negatives, even at the fastest, low-quality resolution, would take hundreds of hours. And, of course, I don’t really need to have a good scan of every image. I just need to know what I have so I can make scans of the small fraction of them that I really care about.
I hit on the idea of creating digital proof sheets. Most of the negs are stored in transparent sleeves that hold a full roll on a page. My scanner (Canoscan 9000F) cannot scan a full page, and even those that can would take a very long time to scan that large an image.
So I bought an LED light panel, set my DSLR (Canon 80D, 75-300 zoom, set to F8) above it and have been putting the sheets on the panel and snapping away. I was able to shoot more than 200 rolls in a couple of hours. I set up some macros in Photoshop Elements to automatically invert and sharpen them. (The processing and naming of the files took longer than shooting them.)
The b&w negs turned out fine, but the proofs of the color negs looked terrible: a deep blue cast that I couldn’t get close to fixing by using the normal color adjustments in PSE. At first I thought that negs had just faded badly and that there was nothing I could do about it.
But after a while it dawned on me that my camera was set to Auto White Balance. It was looking at those orange negs, assuming that that was the normal color of the scene, and making rather extreme adjustments. So I tried setting WB manually to the camera’s lowest setting, 2500K. This yielded much better results. I still have to do a little processing in PSE to boost the contrast and sharpness, but this seems to be a workable solution. (Now I’ll have to go back and redo a couple dozen sheets.)
But I’m not sure this is the *best *solution. Is there a better, or more precise, way of doing this? I got to setting AWB at 2500K by trial and error. But I have a feeling that there must be a filter or setting that would be the *proper *way to solve this problem. Is there?
Have you ever done anything like this, and do you have any other suggestions for improving my workflow or results?