Scanners, Negatives, Photoshop Elements-Advice please..

Hi,
I have a bunch of old negatives. (An old photo album of mine dissappeared). I have most if not all of the negatives. They are different sizes: 126, 110, 35, 120, and ?. What I am think of doing is getting a scanner $100-$150 with a negative holder (I haven't checked but are they adjustable for different size negatives or are most of them for 35mm? I would scan them into my computer, work with them in Photoshop Elements (I have never used the program), and then print out new pictures. Most of the pictures we take today are processed by Kodak and we order the photo CD with it.
The alternative would be to bring my negatives to an independent lab and have them scan them- probably pretty costly.
Can I expect the scanners in the price range I mentioned to do a good job or am I overly optimistic of their capabilities? Is Photoshop Elements the right program for working with the photos once they are in the computer?
What would you recommend? All thoughts and ideas appreciated. Thank you very much

Elements will work well.

Best scanners for 35mm film ONLY do 35mm and smaller.
So you'll need a flatbed with transparency adaptor for the larger ones. Epson models pretty much clearly best.

scantips.com for newbie scanning intro..

M

I have an older Epson and it does do a good job scanning slides and negatives. The adapter, however, only takes 35mm negs. I guess you'd have to make sure the transparency adapter can hold the different sizes you need to scan.

Joe

EDIT: BTW, I have the Espson Perfection 1650 Photo which I think has been replaced by the 1670 < http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?B V_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=35836299> which goes for around $100. I paid over $200 for mine.

Craig--

I agree with the comments on Photshop elements; it's the best program I could find for less than the cost of Photoshop itself.

Regarding the scanners: I think the tricky part for you will be the multiple sizes of your negatives. I have a Minolta Dimage that does an awesome job with 35mm and has an adapter for APS, but nothing else.

Good luck

-Brendon

Craig,

My limited experience with negatives (using a film scanner) is that the colors are "funny" and very hard to correct. It appears there are corrections being done when they print from negs.

Slides (positives) come out much closer and are much easier. You may want to look into "film profiles" issue (basically color correction tables for various films, probably the digital equivalent of what the film printers are doing) in Vuescan, or other programs. I gave up and just scan prints and slides, but if I only had negs I might have tried harder. Maybe others have solved this or have different opinion.

Carl

Craig,
Shopping around will give a quick idea of scanner prices...your question on film strip carriers for the various film sizes is the biggest hurdle for you (as you noted.)

I just bought a very high end scanner that does incredible work, but I plan on evolving my hobby into a small side business later. Do a tally on how many actual images you plan on scanning; my review of the various scanning services available on line show "real end cost" in the .95 to $1.50 range PER scan! For me that started to look like 101 to 67 scans before reaching $100. If you are planning to remain with the "film camera" system for a while, consider a scanner for the film type YOU are now invested in & find someone who will do the album replacement if the total count is less than your budget of $150 max you set above.

The archiving (and for my own use-distribution) via CD makes alot of sense to me too. My reason for being in the Adobe forum lately was to find our if Adobe's Elements would allow me to take my scanned images & burn them to CD's in a .pdf format that would universally readable to both PC & Mac end users.

Regards.

Carl, regarding scanning colour negatives, you must set your scanner to scan negatives. You cannot correctly invert the image of a scanned negative in PSE. This is because colour negatives are not true colour inversions; they have an orange cast. Your scanner on a 'colour negative' setting will correctly interpret these colours. As you have found, trying to do this in PSE is very laborious and not specially successful.

Craig Busch

I have the same problem, a number of 120 size negatives to scan.

Two options appear to be available:
1. A flat bed scanner such as the Epson 4870
2. A dedicated film scanner such as the Dimage Scan Multipro.

The dedicated film scanner costs around ten times the price of the flatbed scanner. Personally for home use I could not possibly justify the more expensive choice which I assume is intended for studio use.

Perhaps someone with experience of using dedicated film scanners could comment on the results compared to the flatbed option.

Roger

Well, first of all, Epson 4870 is about $400 and Minolta Scan Multi (or Nikon 9000) is about $1950, so this is about 5x price diff, not 10x.

M

I think I get better results from old slides with an Epson 3200 flatbed with built-in slide and negative capability than a friend with a Minolta 4000(? don't know if I have the number correct) dedicated slide machine.

You may indeed get a more "pleasing" result, due to any number of a bazillion settings and scanning techniques.

One thing you can NOT get however, is the same actual resolution, ppi for ppi.

Meaning, 3200ppi from your flatbed, while it makes the same number of pixels, will not resolve the same number of line pairs as 3200ppi from a good film scanner.

The larger the film size, the less the difference is significant. For 120 film, one is generally more limited by the actual output media (printers) than by the actual line-pair capability of the two types of scanners. And indeed, since a 120 film scanner is ~$2K, flatbed/tranny adaptor is only practical way to go for most of us. And for 4x5 or larger film, the cost jumps to the $10k range for film scanner options.

But the difference in doing 35mm (or smaller) can be quite dramatic, and the $ diff can be only $200 or less between flatbed and quality film scanner.

M

Davee / all,

I tried my film scanner with various negative film settings & specific film profiles that supposedly matched the film, with both Polaroid (scanner) software & Vuescan. Vuescan got closer, but in no case could I get colors that were acceptable without subsequent PS tweaking, which is very time consuming. This is ok for a few negs that are irreplaceable, but not for routine scanning. By comparison, slide (film scanner) & print (flatbed) scanning always have good colors without any tweaking.

I am interested if anyone gets consistently good color results, easily, with scanning negatives, & if so how. Thanks.

Carl

Negs are tough because they can yield positives of any color balance. A negative is not a "final product" like a chrome.

Ever turn in the same negative to a one hour joint several times over the course of several months? You'll get a different looking print each time!

And each type film has it's own characteristics; some scan better than others too. And yes, one of VueScan's strength's is a pretty darn good color rendition with default settings from color negs, often MUCH better than the scanner's native interface. But this also depends on scanner model; dedicated film scanners generally do better in this regard than flatbeds.

I'm afraid that negatives are always somewhat of a moving target. Ask anyone who's ever tried tried custom color photo printing!

M

Mac, I understand fully what you said from a technical point of view. But it is important to consider the nature of the originals and of the required output in choosing a scanner. My slides are very 'amateur' - mainly recording various events important to me over the last forty years. Most were taken on Agfachrome film, with fairly low-cost 35mm cameras - a Kodak Retinette and Pentax ES.
My objective is a selection of 6x4 prints for albums, and DVD slide shows for TV viewing, so very high performance is not important. It could just show the defects in my technique even more :-(
The 3200 gives me flexibility should I ever get around to the box of black and white negs preceding the slide era, and also provides a regular scanner.

Thanks Mac. Helps me leave my box of negatives alone. Still have plenty of Kodachrome's and prints to scan anyway...

Carl

Carl, I have to scan 35 mm negatives pretty often with my Minolta dedicated scanner and when I use just only the automatic settings they always come out in the right or almost right colours. No problem whatsoever. Tweaking the colours when needed (about 5-10% of the images) takes less than a minute.

Leen

Mac,

I purposefully did not include prices, as here in the UK they are probably different.

Whether the price ratio is 5, 7, 8 or 10 to one, helps us understand the relative merits of these types of scanners, how, exactly?

Roger

The dedicated film scanners have a better reputation. Lower end flatbeds are ...well lets say very ordinary, particularly if the slides are contrasty (as my old kodakchrome tends to be). However I gave the 4870 a good hard try out on a Windows system at a local dealer, using some of my own 35mm slides and the results were surprisingly good. And on the larger 120 film would be even better. I didn't buy it in the end because Epson weren't terribly convincing on the issue of OSX support.
Susan S.

Craig Busch,

Regarding the relative merits of flatbed/film scanners for 120 size negatives. As others have said, it rather depends on what you intend to do with the scans.

If you only require 6 x 4 for your photo album then the less expensive flatbed scanner is probably adequate.
However if you want to make professional quality prints perhaps for larger size commercial publication then the film scanner will give much more control, at a price to match and with implications for the rest of your equipment.

That said, a friend just sends his . jpg files straight from the camera to a local printer and they appear at about 6 x 7 inches in a magazine and look just fine.

If you just want to archive your negatives. An uncompressed archive file that has the eqivalent resolution of a 120 size negative will produce a file size in the order of half a gigabyte or more. If you use one of the usual file compression methods to reduce file size, data will be lost and it can't then be called an accurate archive.

So do not discard your original negatives. There will always be a better archiving system around the corner
--

The technical considerations, as I understand it, are these: (I don't claim any expertise, just info from manufacturers web sites, eg Konica Minolta, Epson and one that was quite helpful,
<http://www.theimage.com/photography/index.htm> If I have made mistakes I'm sure I'll soon be corrected. I havn't any practical experience of fim scanners so can't comment on the actual results obtained. I was hoping to get that from those that have.)

With a home computer set up it is probably not possible to realise the potential of the much more expensive film scanner.
The Minolta unit has a 3 line ccd sensor that will give independent control of the three primary colours.
At first sight more control may appear an advantage, but in practice it has implications for the rest of your set up.

Display monitor:
Adjusting the image. A good monitor capable of being properly set up to accurately display RGB colour is needed to be sure the hues displayed are the correct ones.

Printing
The printer has to match the printed colours to the original. The problem is that a monitor displays colour lit from behind so colours appear brighter than printed colours. The printer has a set or gamut of colours called the CYMK gamut, and this differs from the RGB monitor gamut. Converting from the RGB gamut to the CMYK gamut is the printers speciality and necessary for accurate colour reproduction.

Try entering CMYK in google or try these links:
< http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/digitalphotography/gopro/ fixit/colormanagement.asp> <http://dx.sheridan.com/advisor/cmyk_color.html>
<http://jura.wi.mit.edu/bio/graphics/photoshop/colman.htm>

The more expensive film scanner gives more control over colour and may enable realisation of more accurate colour prints but let you in for even more expensive equipment if you want to achieve those results yourself.

File size:
Native resolution of a 120 negative.
According to the image.com web site above, using Kodak figures, resolution of film is approximately the equivalent of 5000 pixels per inch. Both flat bed and film scanner can scan at 4800 dpi so resolution shouldn't be too much of an issue.
A square inch of negative has the equiv. of 5000 x 5000 = 25 M pixels. A 120 size negative is 3.25 x 2.25 x 25 M = appx 182 M pixel equivalent. At three bytes per pixel that would give 548 MB per negative.

The Konica-Minolta web site, resolution and scan size table gives: For medium format 6 x 9 (120 size) the maximum input pixels at 4800 dpi is 10692 x 15840 pixels. (Note this achieved by interpolation so even with this film scanner the full resolution will not be achieved)
10692 x 15840 = 169,361280 Pixels or 169 M Pixels.
At three bytes per pixel, again the uncompressed file size will be approx 500 MB per negative.

File size could be reduced by the usual lossy compression methods but then it wouldn't be an accurate archive.

So if you are planning archiving your old negative album, then you will need a lot of hard disk space.

In any event keep your negatives.

Roger

Just a couple of comments:

With a home computer set up it is probably not possible to realise the potential of the much more expensive film scanner.

Computer doesn't have to be particularly high end, P4 2GHZ and up is good, at least 512MB RAM and beau coup HD space.

Both flat bed and film scanner can scan at 4800 dpi so
resolution shouldn't be too much of an issue.

You'll get the same number of pixels, but the actual resolving power of those pixels are quite different.
You'll find that the flatbed 4800 will be about 3000 actual equivalent, measured by how many actual line pairs it will resolve in comparison to the 4800 from the film scanner. The smaller the film size (or crop from larger size), the more this matters for output size.

Mac