As per subject, are there any photographers here who have loads of poorly organised C41 and B&W negatives (as I have managed over the years) ?.
Is there a phone app that allows a whole film of negs to be laid out on a light box and for the phone to instantly show the pictures in positive without all the faff of scanning individual frames ?.
This makes it easier to find 'missing' negatives and decide which ones to scan properly.
All I can find is an app called FilmLAB. Are there any others ?. Do any smart phones have this feature built-in ?.
The default camera on my Andriod phone has a negative mode in the special effect settings. When enabled anything the camera is viewing (in real time) comes up with the negative image on the screen.
Black text on a white background on a computer screen is seen as white text on a black background.
I reversed a monochrome photo in "paint.net" and then viewed it in negative mode on the phone and the result was very close to the original.
Did the same with a colour photo (invert colours) and viewed it it in negative mode on the phone and its back to original colours (brightness and contrast a bit washed out, but probably due to computer screen brightness)
I've got a flatbed and a high quality dedicated slide scanner (one that does Kodachrome) but as the original post stated, I need to look through a lot of C41 *negatives* without the hassle of scanning them, simply to decide which ones do need scanning.
If you can find a good secondhand Epson V700 they can scan 35mm negative strips. The software that comes with the scanner will automatically produce a fair shot at getting the colour balance right from colour negatives.
I have a Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED :-). But it is laborious to use, hence the need for a means to see what the photo is almost immediately before proper scanning.
One thing I've wondered when scanning negatives (eg with a film or flat-bed scanner) is how they deal with the strong orange cast of the negative. The light is still white, so the level of blue (complimentary colour of orange/yellow) will be a lot lower than the other colours. It's easy enough to scale the RGB values to compensate, but this will mean a lot more noise in B than R and G.
My experience of scanning slides and negs is that it is *much* easier to get a good faithful scan from a (positive) slide. With a negative, there is a lot more grain apparent, even comparing a fine-grained slow neg film with coarse-grained Ektachrome 400 slide film. I wonder some of this is the increased noise in the blue channel. Colours for neg film always look a bit artificial - rather like those "colour plates" that you used to get in old books which had exaggerated saturation and low contrast.
One interesting thing that I discovered by experimenting: I got better scans of B&W negatives by scanning them a colour negs than scanning them as B&W negs.
This was with either an Epson Perfection 1200 flat-bed scanner or a Minolta Scan Elite II film scanner. It didn't help that of all the preset values for "common" colour negs, there wasn't one for any of the Kodak films that I'd used. It would help if the presets were named by the edge-marking code on the negative, because by the time you've got the developed negs, you no longer have the canister which said "Kodacolor II 400" or whatever.
Yes, I think that's where the Epson wins as it does a preview scan quite quickly and you can then decide which images are worth spending more time on.
It also does a pretty good job of sorting out basic colour balance problems automatically so you can just stick the slides/negatives in, tell it to scan, and leave it to it for the several minutes it takes.
Is it, I didn't know that. I looked at a review a while ago that compared the V700 and the V800 and there wasn't a huge amount of difference if I remember right.
The V700's software handles the red mask automatically. You just tell it that you're scanning colour negative material and it does the rest. It's remarkably good actually at getting acceptable results from quite badly faded negatives (and slides).
You can of course 'tune' things further if you want.
I also have a 1999 epson photo 1200 flatbed scanner which I still use for scanning documents and prints. IT also has an addition plug-in 'light box' that sits on top of the flat bed and shines through the supplied film holders. I have never used the light box though, it only takes 1 or 2 exposures of a film strip at a time, which is still too slow with the number of old films involved.
The Coolscan 9000 has a special light channel for Kodachrome and scanning old commercial slides that have turned bright red is amazing. The Nikon scan program has a one-touch colour correction button that just reveals the original colours with minimal extra faffing about. Ditto scanning C41 negatives. Silverfast is even better (well it is German) but v. expensive. VueScan I might try one day if I move on from Win10 to Apple iMac or Mac mini.
It's still a damn good scanner. I produces better results than the scanner in my Epson SX515W all-in-one printer/scanner, and *much**much* better results than the scanner in my HP LJ Pro M283fdw (the printer is fantastic but the scanner is little better than a toy).
It's a shame that scanners often have a raised bevel around the edge which means that if you need to scan a large item (a panoramic school photo) it is standing proud of the glass which for some scanners means it's out of focus.
One thing to watch out for with the epson photo 1200 when scanning film is the problem of dust/dirt in the calibration window above the area where the film strip/slides goes. If there is a piece of dust it upsets the calibration for the pixels that cover it, so you get a coloured streak all down the film at that point. Keep that calibration windows spotlessly clean.
I found I could preview scan a strip of negs about every 10 seconds. If you are not bothered about focus or alignment, you can just place them on the glass without feeding them into the negative carrier which is a bit fiddly. That allows you to see what the photos are and decide which to scan properly.
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