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Comment by tmjwid | Hacker News Reader

What a great little project. I find it strange somehow, through the wind, someone always posts a project that relates to me in my current hobbies here on hn. I've just started scanning my 35mm negatives with my dslr (with macro lens) and a film holder on a lightbox. It's easy and much quicker than a dedicated flatbed, but more work post process.

For anyone wanting to do this, you will need to invert your b&w or colour negatives with software capable of processing RAW files (lightroom, darktable, rawtherapee) white balance the negative, invert and then colour/exposure correct the final image. I use darktable for this and the latest version has a real nice plugin called negadoctor that can give you a great starting point. For lightroom, NegativeLabPro is the goto tool and works in a similar way to negadoctor but is better at producing the initial image.

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I did the same. I kept post processing to a minimum. Load pictures into Lightroom, apply NLP, save. If you have over 10k negatives you don't have time for every picture. NLP produces acceptable (and in my view very good) results with no additional processing required.

Also if you have that many negatives, every step you need to take is one step too many. My frames came from the camera without any borders, so no cropping needed. Don't put the negatives in the "wrong" way. Base vs. emulsion debate is just that - a debate with miniscule differences.

I had a foot-switch for release so that you can use both hands for the camera and focus. Then you'll achieve ~5 minutes for a full 36 frame roll of (strips of 4-6 frames) film.

i'm also exploring this, and have found my mirrorless to produce noticeably sharper images than the Epson V600 but not quite as sharp as an Imacon Flextight.

to save time, i have saved some presets for colour correcting using a single curves layer. since i end up tweaking every scan anyway, it speeds down the workflow by cutting down on the process.

That's a great way to work and it is something I think I will do as well. create some presets that give good results then tweak accordingly. Now I just need to get better at colour correcting in the first place!

it def gets easier with practice! i've found that colours stay pretty consistent across a roll and stock type so a per-film, per-light temperature presets work well (day, night, indoor).

I'm curious, how is the quality of such a setup vs dedicated scanner?

I am using both a dedicated 35mm film scanner (not flatbed) and a DSLR with macro for repro, the latter for medium format film.

The outcome quality of both processes is identical and great quality, but the DSLR repro way is a little bit more cumbersome. It takes me longer to get a really good result with a lightbox than with the dedicated film scanner. Not by long, but it adds up if I have a couple of 120 film to repro.

I shoot repro with a Nikon D700 in RAW using a 105mm macro lens on a regular stand, with a bubble calibrator. The lightbox is a small cardboard box spray painted in black, with flippable/removable cutouts to fit 6x4,5 up to 6x7. I use an old discarded iPad mini, setup with a white image on max brightness as backlight.

Using Capture One (my preference of editing suite), I connect my camera with a USB cable and import directly into the editing suite. No need for importing of a CF/SD card. Smooth process.

Pretty much what scrdhrt has said is spot on. Quality is very much the same, and the output is rather good. I don't have anything to show you from my own work as a comparison, but there is plenty of reference material on reddit and photo blogs about the process.

Time wise, the speed of snapping a photo is also mostly outweighted by the time needed to post process the image (neg invert, white balance, colour correct) versus the slow scanning speed of a flatbed negative scanner. Never used the cheaper 35mm scanners you can buy, but from what I’ve seen they're just the dslr approach without the quality.

I think it comes down to two questions. 1: Do you own a dslr with a macro lens? 2: Do you know how to use raw editors like lightroom or darktable?

If yes to both, then dslr scanning is easily the cheaper of the two and is most likely the best route to go to test the process.

Much better. Unless you have a scanner with real 4000 dpi your DSLR with 20+ MP will achieve better and faster results.

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