Scanning Negatives

Factual Questions
1

I have boxes full of color negatives that I would like to organize somehow. I recently bought a scanner which has a nifty little negative holder which works beautifully if you only have a few negatives to scan, but but is way to slow for the volume I have.

I would like to lay my negatives out on the scanning bed, place a sheet of glass on top if them to hole them flat, backlight it somehow, and scan away. It’s the backlighting part that I can’t quite figure out.

Has anyone done something like this, and can you offer me any tips? If anyone has volume scanned color slides, the process would no doubt be similar.

2

A film scanner is probably better for you. They have them on ebay.com search for like say, HP S20 S20XI PHOTOSMART FILM SCANNER

3

You don’t need to get a whole film scanner if you already have a flatbed one. See if a transparency attachment is available for your scanner. That will provide a holder for your transparencies of any size and the backlight.

4

My current scanner, an Epson 2400 PHOTO, has a transparency attachment built in, but it can only handle one strip of negatives at a time - about 5 or 6 photos - and this is just too slow for my needs. I would rather scan an entire bed of negatives at once, and I’m hoping I can kludge something together with my current hardware.

5

Try taking the cover off, replacing it with a sheet of glass to hold the negs, putting some kind of white sheet a foot above the scanner, and backlighting from the side.

Just an ignorant suggestion.

6

Here’s a couple of thoughts:

First, if you’re scanning at 800 dpi or above (which you really need to do if you want an acceptable print from the scan; if you’re just scanning in the negs to create a proof sheet, you can get away with less resolution) then you already know that it takes a good 25 minutes just to complete the scan. In my opinion, the 2 minutes it takes to switch the negatives in the holder is small change compared to the overal time of the process (plus if you use the holder, the software allows you to end up with a different file for each negative, if you scan in a whole bunch of negatives under glass, you will need to chop apart the final scan -which will be huge- if you want to get 1 image per file.).

Second, if you do decide to use a piece of glass to scan negative en masse, use a piece of opaque glass of plexiglass. If you use clear stuff, sometimes a reflection from the bottom surface of the glass bounces around ‘in’ the glass and end up on the top surface of the glass, which results in a sort of ghosting or sometimes a ‘lens flare’ type of artifact.

Not certain about the 2400, but on my 2450, the backlight is roughly 70% of the total scannable area. Is it significantly smaller on the 2400? (Trying to figure out how much more area you will gain if you use a different light source).

7

Great Gravy! Are you sure your scanner and PC are working correctly?

8

On to the OP.

You really are up against a wall with this. I’ve tried the same type of thing with mine, and never got useable results.

You need a homogenous light source - same intensity over the entire scan area. Your best bet here would be to use a light source in a box. The box would be painted white on the inside, and you would need lights around the edges. Then put a piece of frosted glass on the open side. That should get you a fairly even light source.

If you don’t heve an even light source, you’ll get really flaky brightness on the pictures.

The box should be mounted above the scan surface, with walls around it to block out ambient light. Think of your light box sitting on top of another box (open top and bottom) that sits on your scanner.

The supporting box (and the bottom of the light source box) should be painted flat black to cut down on reflections that might make for uneven lighting.

Once you’ve got an even light source, you need to make sure it is bright enough, and it needs to be of the right color.

The brightness is obvious. The color is maybe not so.

The scanner is calibrated to work with its own light source. It “knows” more or less what to expect as far as colors go. It can the scanned colors to remove the effects of its own light source color (the lamp does not put out a pure white.)

If the color of your new light is too different, then the scanner may do a pretty crappy job of compensating for it - and all of the colors in your scanned photos will be screwed up.

What you are wanting to do is not trivial. Do consider either purchasing a negative scanner or else have it done professionally.

BTW:
I scanned a full page at 800dpi, and it clocked in at about five minutes. My computer is no great shakes (Celeron 700MHz, 128Megs Ram.) The scanner is a Mustek 12000SP plus connected via SCSI, and I’m using XSane and the GIMP under Linux. Pick any part of the above and call it resposible for the results.

9

I have to scan some slides on my scanner and I’ve been researching the same topic. I haven’t tried these techniques out yet, but I found this link to be helpful:

Four methods of scanning slides without using an adaptor

10

The reason I mentioned that film scanner is because on fatwallet.com they are talking about it & it seems to be a pretty decent solution. YMMV

Scanner talk: (It’s $459 at buy.com but now under $100 at ebay)
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=18&threadid=193517

11

If you want anything resembling quality, I’d say ditch the flatbed method. You can get a decent film scanner in the $500 or less price range. In particular, look for the Nikon LS-2000 (second-hand on Ebay) or the Polaroid SprintScans are quite good, too.

With a decent computer and SCSI connection, the LS-2000 should be able to give you 2700 dpi scans (for 20+ Megabyte file) in about 2 minutes or so. It even has a Clean Scan mode for particularly dirty negatives. (Only works on color negs, color slides, and color-process black-and-white films such as Kodak T400CN). The clean scan takes a bit more time, but produces absolutely gorgeous results – saves lots of time on Photoshopping dusty negs.

There’s a Polaroid SprintScan 4000 on sale on Ebay for the Buy-It-Now price of $250, which I would consider a steal. 4000 dpi scans, fast. It says Macintosh 7.5 or later required on the specs, but I’m pretty sure if you have SCSI and the proper software, it’ll work on a Windows platform.

Check these out. I’ve really been unimpressed by flatbeds and their scanning quality.