Copying film negatives with a DSLR instead of a Scanner.

G'day, I'm Walter Gawronski and I have just begun this film blog, among others.

I'm now an old fart, and I started shooting film back in the early 80s when flares, disco and mutton chop sideburns where still 'in'. (Now I don't give a shit what's in.)

One of the subjects that comes up frequently about digitising film for post processing is how to scan it economically, which is the 'best' scanner etc etc.

Now this is not intended as advice for Professionals that shoot film, obviously they would send theirs out to be drum scanned because of time constraints, but rather for blokes like me that do it as a hobby.

Back in those days we enlarged and printed our images, usually in a purpose built darkroom. Here's mine from that era, built into an existing garage. The bloke in the picture is me in my pre-obese state. (that phase didn't last long).

It had all the requirements of the day, a beer er..film fridge to process black and white and colour - C41, a Jobo temperature controlled bath with a motorised drum roller.

The condition of this picture is due to "archival" neg sleeves that turned out to be not so archival. The chemicals in the neg sleeves took a liking to the emulsion on the negs and ate it.

Another good reason to digitise negs, and backup - a lot.

Anyway, back to the subject of the blog - digitising. (We old farts tend to run off at the mouth and reminisce a lot.)

Ok, reasons to use your DSLR and not to run out and buy a bespoke neg scanner straight away.

1) You probably already own a DSLR.
2) You may have a macro lens, if not at least a set of $12 extension tubes.
3) It's quicker to copy a neg than scan it, especially at high resolutions.
4) You can use exposure bracketing during copy and combine images to get the best balance of light and shadow.
5) You can copy any size neg you like, to any resolution you like, even with a crop sensor DSLR.
6) Image quality is generally better. (click the link and see the comparisons.)
7) You only need to spend a little money.

There's probably more reasons, but none are popping into my noggin right now.

There's a million ways to use your DSLR for this purpose, I have copied 6x4.5 negs using an old salt container, cardboard and sticky tape when I began, it worked very well but was a bit slow.

I used this temporary setup to copy some medium format shots from my old Bronica SQA back in the 80's, the intent was to digitise them for preservation as the dreaded fungi had started to take hold and was munching on the gelatine. I didn't have a big pile of medium format negs so it wasn't worth making anything better than this at the time.


I currently use the setup below, an old enlarger stand, neg holders from ebay, a light source, preferably around 5200 kelvin. My light source is a 12 inch square LED light panel meant for office ceiling lighting, it's very white and very bright, I paid $50 for it on one of those 'daily deal' websites.

Now, I made life easy for myself by using a Camranger remote and an iPad mini to focus at 100% magnification, so I can actually focus on the grain.
The Camranger saves me having to get up and down out of my chair to focus on each neg using Liveview, and allows me to easily shoot a set of bracketed shots, but there is absolutely no need for this, it's just that I'm averse to exercise, I already owned the Camranger and iPad.

The most important things about using your DSLR for copying are listed below.

• Make sure your camera/lens is square to the neg, or you may find edges out of focus. I use a $3 disk type appliance spirit level on top of the DSLR.
• Use a proper neg holder, the type used in old enlargers are good and don't cost much and keep your neg flat.
• The light source should be bright, even, diffused and the correct colour temperature, you can even use your flash with a bit of DIY.
• Mask any extraneous light emanating from your source, light leaks can cause lack of contrast in the copy.
• Use a dim room. No need for darkness, just make sure ambient light doesn't register with the exposure you're using.
• Set your camera to manual, any auto functions are no good for consistency or accurate enough.
• Recheck focus between frames, things can be bumped accidentally.
• Bracket high contrast images, you can blend using layers in PS for detail in highlight and shadow. (provided the detail is in the neg to begin with).
• Use an aperture of around f8 so you have sufficient DOF, but even f5.6 works.
• Always use a remote shutter release.
• Use the biggest blower you can get to dust your negs prior to copy - actually this applies to any method of copy/scanning. A Giotto Rocket, is good, it will save hours of spotting in post. (don't be one of those people that leaves hairs, dust and crap all over the finished image to 'give the feeling' of film, no one ever did that when film was king)

I currently copy 35mm and 6x4.5 negs with a single shot because most of my images are uploaded to the web, and I find the resolution good enough for that. but on occasion I do copy 6x6 and larger in segments.

However, for even greater resolution,  negs can also be copied in many more sections, by sliding the neg holder around under the camera and stitching the segments together in Photoshop using the photomerge tool, located in File>Automate>Photogmerge. Photoshop does a great job of seamless and invisible joins.

A word of warning, Photomerge likes to have several reference points in each frame to be able to do the merging. Large blank areas of a neg like clear sky don't merge well because there is no point of reference, so you may need to merge these by hand, each segment copied becomes it's own layer in PS. Each frame should also have good overlap to ensure success.

If you're going to do this in segments, it pays to mark out the work surface your neg holder is sitting on into a grid, so you know each segment will be in the right place, and the segment kept square to the whole, or merging problems may occur.

I have merged 16 segment shots of 6x6 negs without a problem, I have heard of people merging over a hundred segments for massive resolution. So, your patience is the limiting factor for resolution.

The below shot was from a Yashica D TLR on 120 Ilford fp4 roll film, copied in 16 segments. My post processing skills with negs were still in the learning stage, so the shot could have looked a lot better.

I'm just saying that the quality of copied negs is as good as most scanners, and a whole heap cheaper if you already own a DSLR and any lens and will save you money.

If you have a decent scanner, by all means use it. But if you don't have one and don't want to spend the money, then this works well.
Old enlargers or copy stands can be bought online for peanuts, so can the neg carriers.

I have a range of carriers, from plastic 35mm 6 frame strip ones, 6x4.5, 6x6, 6x9, all the bigger sizes being from old enlargers. I even have some magnetised plastic frames that can be sandwiched with the neg to create any crop size needed.

The main thing obviously is to keep the negs clean, flat and square to the camera.

For the light source, the LED panel I have works fine, but I intend to build a box, white on the inside with the neg carrier on top of some diffused acrylic sheet, into which I wll fire a flash.

I've tried this on a temporary setup and the results are superior to the LED panel with slightly better contrast, see the image below. It's just a pyramid shaped plastic bowl with a flat top, it was white in colour, so I painted it with a spray can of flexible matte paint. It worked ok, but was a bit light and flimsy. It just gives you an idea of what can be used.

The type of neg carrier used and the little spirit level on top of the camera are visible to give you an idea what I mean.

If you go this way, make sure the flash and camera are set to manual for consistent results.

This setup is constantly in a state of flux, as I think of improvements, but I don't mind a bit of tinkering either, it's interesting to see what can be done at home.

I found there is a huge difference between the way a film neg digital copy should be processed compared to a native digital image.

For a start, if you need to roughly halve the adjustments you would normally use with noise, contrast, clarity, sharpening etc.

By far the best way is to process in Photoshop Camera Raw as a Smart Object, the adjustments are not done directly to the image, enabling a bit more leeway in the adjustment sliders. Also,  using Smart Sharpen (Filters>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen) allows re-adjustment of the sharpening operation. It does the same job and works the same way as the Unsharp Mask, but as I said, is re-adjustable. I find a good setting for film in general is: Amount around 110, Radius 0.9, Reduce Noise 18.

Here's one of my later 35mm shots from an Olympus OM-10 on fp4, copied with a single shot.

That's about all on that topic, time for a beer.