Hi all,
A quick question for some of the more experienced members of the list - I recently got a Minolta DiMage Scan Dual III to go along with my Nikon N80, Tamron 19-35, 28-80, and 75-300 lenses, and an old N65 body for a spare (I'm saving up for my F100, eventually, lol)... My quandry is thus -- It seems like a really nice scanner, and most of the reviews I've seen of it have been great, as well as the reports from other people I know who have used it, however I can't seem to get anything even remotely bordering on halfway decent scans out of it. Either the color balance is way off, or the scans look too washed, or the contrast is horrific, but with all of the film I've scanned so far, I haven't gotten one decent looking scan. My intent when I got it was to scan in my entire assortment of negatives (easily 300+ rolls of color and another 200+ of B&W) and be able to get a good catalog of images online, as well as hopefully be able to do most of my future work with the digital negatives instead of the print ones, I'm a travel writer & photographer by profession so tend to do a lot of shooting, and a lot of going back looking for old stock type stuff, and piecing together images for stories and covers and guidebooks occasionally years after the initial story was written gets to be tedious when it entails digging through old boxes of negatives. Needless to say however, none of that will work if I can't get good scans in. Does anyone know of any good tutorials or beginning/intro type articles on getting good film scans in, especially with the DiMage Dual III? I'm not brand new to digital imaging and image processing (I've used photoshop for a few years now at a slightly-above basic level and have gotten into some fairly complicated retouching a few times), but a couple of the advanced pieces I've seen have been way beyond me.
Thanks in advance for the help, and feel free to reply off-list if you'd prefer,
Darren S. Dale Travel Writer & Photographer mrspock@insnet.com
407 W. Grant St., Ste J Macomb, IL 61455
Tel: (309) 837-2260 Fax: (928) 395-2548
Daren, I too have a Scan Dual III and it took me awile to figure out how to get good scans from negatives out of it. The solution I found was to do as little as possible in the scanning software provided.
Here is my procedure for scanning negatives, the procedure varies slightly for black and white and color negatives as is more laborious than just loading the scanner and pushing a button, but I get what I think are good results.
First step, for both color and black and white is to set the following in the preference pane of the DS Dual3 Utility:
"Exposure control for negatives" should be set to auto
"Auto expose for slides" should be checked.
"Color Depth" should be set to 16 Bit Linear.
Set the media type menu for color negatives.
Load your negative holder and press the Index Scan button.
Select the preview of the frame you want to scan and press the prescan tab.
In the prescan window you will see a broken line around the perimeter of the scan. This is the cropping area of the scan, don't touch it. Instead hold down the shift key and the line becomes solid. This represents the area that the scanner uses to calculate autoexposure. With your mouse pointer drag these solid lines in so that none of the white area around the image is included. This will prevent the scanner from thinking that the negative holder is a very dense part of the negative.
Press the scan button. The utility will prompt you to save the scan as a tiff file. (This is the only option you have with a 16 bit linear file.
Open the tiff in photoshop. You will now be dismayed to find that the image is a negative and not a positive. This is not a mistake. 16 bit linear files are not inverted.
The following steps should be done on a 16 bit version of the file. If you do not have the full version of photoshop or some other 16 bit editing program you need to get one. You can try doing in on an 8-bit version of the file but you may get posterization as these steps shuffle tones around quite a bit.
The first step is invert the image.
The image will look awful. It will be dark, flat, and blue. That will all change shortly.
The second step is to set the highlight and shadow clipping points for each color channel.
In photoshop, use the levels command. In the levels dialog box, perform the following steps on each color channel separately. The menu near the top of the dialog box. lets you choose the color channel.
Starting with the red channel, hold down the option key (alt on windows) and click on the leftmost sliding triangle. The file window should go completely white. Still with the option key depressed, slowly drag the triangle to the left until you start seeing some of the image come up out of the white field. The pixels you see when you do this will all be set to the darkest red value. Your goal is to place the triangle where you have the least number of pixels clipped in the shadows that is more than zero. (If you have no pixels clipped the image will look light and washed out.)
Now go to the rightmost triangle and, holding down option, drag the triangle to the left.
This time you have a black field and light pixels will begin to appear as you move the slider. You want to move this slider until you see pixels from a defuse highlight in the image come up. Ignore the pixels in the while surround and speculator highlights. Again you want a minimum but non zero number of pixels at the clipping point.
Repeat these steps for the green and blue channel.
Now you should have an image with a pretty good color balance and pretty good brightness. If there is still a color cast go to color channel appropriate for the cast and and move the center triangle left or right to remove the cast.
Now go to the composite channel and move the center triangle left or right until the overall brightness of the image is where you want it.
Close the levels dialog.
You now have an image that should look pretty good, with correct color and a good tonal range. It will probably be somewhat flat in the midtones and slightly desaturated.
Both of these can be corrected by applying an S-shaped curve to the image. Play around in the curves dialog until you find something you like.
Make the following changes when scanning black and white negatives:
Before the prescan set the media type to black and white negative.
After you have set the autoexposure area but before you press the scan button. Set the media type from Black and White Negative to Color Positive.
When you set the clipping points in the levels dialog box, use the composite channel instead of the individual color channels.
After closing the levels dialog, choose the Hue and Saturation command and pull the saturation slider all the way to the left. (Or convert the file to grayscale.)
At some point I should have mentioned that you should be doing all of this on a copy of the tiff from the scanner and the original tiff should be put away someplace safe.
There you have it. It seems like alot of steps, but in practice they only take a few seconds per file. I think you will be much happier with you scans if you practice the procedure.
If you have any questions, feel free to write me, either on this list or privately.
-- James Patrick Griffin
mailto:james@james-griffin-photography.com
http://james-griffin-photography.com
