You may be able to flatten them using warm, humid air. The National Archives did this with some early sheet-film negatives dating to 1889 or so that had severe curl. They used small chambers with warm water vapor for several hours, then cooler water vapor and manual flattening. The sheets were then sandwiched between archival paper, and place under weight. After they dried, the negatives were put in polyester sleeves.
A convenient size could be three frames across, as loose-leaf style plastic sleeves are available that accept 4 strips of film with three frames each in 6 by 6 cm format.
That's a word I learned the meaning of only 3 months ago. Found a business selling flax tow. Obvious what it meant, but I did look it up to verify.
How To Flatten A Spiral Roll Of Film Without Cracking It
It may be an early form of acetate. Here is a quick sketch of a method I have used in the past to flatten out a spiralled roll of film without cracking it. As you know, the film is brittle, and it is going to take a long time to flatten them out. Feed the end of the lim into the leaves of a large book a couple of millimetres at a time. This could take months, but as they are pictures from your childhood, it will be worth it. Just be very careful, and try not to rush it.
ToS
It may be an early form of acetate. Here is a quick sketch of a method I have used in the past to flatten out a spiralled roll of film without cracking it. As you know, the film is brittle, and it is going to take a long time to flatten them out. Feed the end of the lim into the leaves of a large book a couple of millimetres at a time. This could take months, but as they are pictures from your childhood, it will be worth it. Just be very careful, and try not to rush it.
ToS
Attachments
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Digital Media Storage Options
It is a real quandary what to do with digitised photos. I suggest that multiple formats is the way to go, and to back up in triplicate. One copy in the house, another placed with a friend, the third stored in a bank deposit box.
And to do it on CD, BlueRay, USB hard drives, USB memory sticks, and the Cloud. I know this may sound excessive, but with digital storage still in its infancy, you need to future proof your options by using multiple formats.
At the moment your best bet for archival stability is the BlueRay format
ToS
It is a real quandary what to do with digitised photos. I suggest that multiple formats is the way to go, and to back up in triplicate. One copy in the house, another placed with a friend, the third stored in a bank deposit box.
And to do it on CD, BlueRay, USB hard drives, USB memory sticks, and the Cloud. I know this may sound excessive, but with digital storage still in its infancy, you need to future proof your options by using multiple formats.
At the moment your best bet for archival stability is the BlueRay format
ToS
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I still have a bit of a collection of old cameras including an F, F2 and a Contarex,
I'm hoping the Space Cadets will develop an interest in analog photography like they did with vinyl, believing that they are missing something.
Making Digital Scans Using A Slide Projector
You could in fact make very good digital copies of projected slides using your EOS Rebel digicam.
Set the digicam to medium telephoto setting and using a flash shoe spirit level, set it up square to the screen behind the projector. Now get the projector squared up to the screen. It's a bit of a pig, but can be done.
Scroll through the digicam white balance settings to match the projectors halide bulb colour temperature.
Set your camera aperture at around f6.3 to f8 for optimum sharpness, and use a lenshood to cut down on any glare.
Switch on the projector and leave to heat stabilise for a few minutes. Put in your 'test slide' - something with lots of straight lines to help you focus and align the projector lens. It might heat up and 'pop' out of focus, that's OK, just refocus the projector. Slides often buckle slightly when projected - unless they are in glass mounts - another story. If all the slides are of identical film stock and mounted the same, this will be our null focus position.
Use the digicam's autofocus to lock onto the test slide on screen, then lock off the focus so that it is fixed.
You will have to bracket your (time based) exposures to get the full dynamic range of the projected slide, going from grossly under to grossly over exposed - anything up to nine stops. Afterwards you can feed them into the high dynamic range (HDR) software of your choice to tone map everything together. Best to shoot them, if you can, as 16bit RAW files, otherwise use JPEGs on a high quality setting.
There will be some fall off of illumination towards the edges of the projection screen, but that can be corrected afterwards in post production.
Yes, it's a lot of work and tedious faffing about to get a result, or you can get yourself a dedicated film scanner for another kind of equally insane but different kind of faffing about.
I can guarantee that if you go along the commercial route you will certainly get a result, but it might not match up to either your needs or expectations, unless you pay a great deal of money, and even then it will more than likely be farmed out to an offshore sweatshop, with the very real risk of accidental loss or damage.
If you do it DIY, you will definitely get a worthwhile result with what you already have. 🙂
ToS
You could in fact make very good digital copies of projected slides using your EOS Rebel digicam.
Set the digicam to medium telephoto setting and using a flash shoe spirit level, set it up square to the screen behind the projector. Now get the projector squared up to the screen. It's a bit of a pig, but can be done.
Scroll through the digicam white balance settings to match the projectors halide bulb colour temperature.
Set your camera aperture at around f6.3 to f8 for optimum sharpness, and use a lenshood to cut down on any glare.
Switch on the projector and leave to heat stabilise for a few minutes. Put in your 'test slide' - something with lots of straight lines to help you focus and align the projector lens. It might heat up and 'pop' out of focus, that's OK, just refocus the projector. Slides often buckle slightly when projected - unless they are in glass mounts - another story. If all the slides are of identical film stock and mounted the same, this will be our null focus position.
Use the digicam's autofocus to lock onto the test slide on screen, then lock off the focus so that it is fixed.
You will have to bracket your (time based) exposures to get the full dynamic range of the projected slide, going from grossly under to grossly over exposed - anything up to nine stops. Afterwards you can feed them into the high dynamic range (HDR) software of your choice to tone map everything together. Best to shoot them, if you can, as 16bit RAW files, otherwise use JPEGs on a high quality setting.
There will be some fall off of illumination towards the edges of the projection screen, but that can be corrected afterwards in post production.
Yes, it's a lot of work and tedious faffing about to get a result, or you can get yourself a dedicated film scanner for another kind of equally insane but different kind of faffing about.
I can guarantee that if you go along the commercial route you will certainly get a result, but it might not match up to either your needs or expectations, unless you pay a great deal of money, and even then it will more than likely be farmed out to an offshore sweatshop, with the very real risk of accidental loss or damage.
If you do it DIY, you will definitely get a worthwhile result with what you already have. 🙂
ToS
Nikon Coolscan III (LS30) is a very good scanner
I too, have a Nikon Coolscan 3, it is a very good scanner made at a time when Nikon still made stuff in Japan. The Nikon software bundled with it was OKish, and the Mac version was a bit flakey. I use VueScan with mine, as it gives the ability to scan in multi-sample mode, and to produce 16bit RAW scans. Even though the Coolscan 3 is a 12bit scanner, the results can be very good. A 2700dpi scan can make an inkjet print (depending on the subject matter) up to A2 in size, and still look good. The infra-red dust reducer works very well on colour neg and E6 tranny, not so good on Kodachrome.
Hang on to your old Nikons, they will last forever! 🙂
ToS
I too, have a Nikon Coolscan 3, it is a very good scanner made at a time when Nikon still made stuff in Japan. The Nikon software bundled with it was OKish, and the Mac version was a bit flakey. I use VueScan with mine, as it gives the ability to scan in multi-sample mode, and to produce 16bit RAW scans. Even though the Coolscan 3 is a 12bit scanner, the results can be very good. A 2700dpi scan can make an inkjet print (depending on the subject matter) up to A2 in size, and still look good. The infra-red dust reducer works very well on colour neg and E6 tranny, not so good on Kodachrome.
Hang on to your old Nikons, they will last forever! 🙂
ToS
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I still have an F3.
The best camera I have ever owned is the Rollei 6008 with a bunch of Schneider lenses.
Why Linhof-Schneider Lenses Are The Best
Schneider lenses are amazingly good optics. Linhof used to get first shout from Schneider, and they would test everything themselves and take the top 10% from the production line for their own cameras. The rest of the world got the other 90%. If you ever see any lens marked with 'Linhof-Schneider' just grab it. 🙂
ToS
Schneider lenses are amazingly good optics. Linhof used to get first shout from Schneider, and they would test everything themselves and take the top 10% from the production line for their own cameras. The rest of the world got the other 90%. If you ever see any lens marked with 'Linhof-Schneider' just grab it. 🙂
ToS
I'm very pleased with the Coolscan, it does a really good job on slides that have been correctly exposed and focused, unfortunately many of my Dad's slide are not and most family shots only just make it into the frame!
I'm scanning all the old stuff and trying to get a resemblance of natural colour with IrfanView, a free programme. I should also include many of my slides taken years ago with a folding Kodak Retina with no rangefinder or exposure meter.
It seems if the film's exposure is not spot on, the colour shifts over the years.
Colour Shifts And Variations In Exposure Density
Correct me if I am wrong, but is it the colour negs that are a bit thin that are giving the most trouble?
Colour (and) B&W film is very much like analog recording tape in that the greater the exposure (aka signal!) the higher the level of saturation of colour and compression of tonal range, especially in the highlights. So if the negative is a bit thin, there is a lesser range of colour to effectively manipulate.
You can either upgrade your software to VueScan, which would be a tad difficult with Windows 98 - or - really go for 'funky colour'. Besides, old colour film stocks have their own particular, often peculiar colour aesthetic, and so long as it looks good, that's great.
I will talk about colour correction theory and technique at a later date. 🙂
ToS
Correct me if I am wrong, but is it the colour negs that are a bit thin that are giving the most trouble?
Colour (and) B&W film is very much like analog recording tape in that the greater the exposure (aka signal!) the higher the level of saturation of colour and compression of tonal range, especially in the highlights. So if the negative is a bit thin, there is a lesser range of colour to effectively manipulate.
You can either upgrade your software to VueScan, which would be a tad difficult with Windows 98 - or - really go for 'funky colour'. Besides, old colour film stocks have their own particular, often peculiar colour aesthetic, and so long as it looks good, that's great.
I will talk about colour correction theory and technique at a later date. 🙂
ToS
I think that's because the dye transfer of the Kodachrome makes ridges on the film.
None of the IR dust reduction systems claim to work well with Kodachrome. I think that there is residual silver after process, where all negs and E-type slides bleach it all away. These days, even $100 desktop scanners that include film/slide adapters do a very creditable job, at least as good as my Minolta Scan Speed did.
Notes About Scanning Kodachrome
Kodachrome, if I remember correctly, was the original tricolour pack film where the three RGB layers had incorporated mordants that picked up the dyes during the processing, with separate exposures to red, green, and blue light combined with bleaching baths. The emulsion like you say, has residual silver combined with coloured dyes, giving it the greatest tonal range possible. Hence its three dimensional surface structure making it impervious to IR dust reduction.
Very difficult process, never entirely perfect, but capable of incredible colour with the longest archival life of any colour film.
ToS
Kodachrome, if I remember correctly, was the original tricolour pack film where the three RGB layers had incorporated mordants that picked up the dyes during the processing, with separate exposures to red, green, and blue light combined with bleaching baths. The emulsion like you say, has residual silver combined with coloured dyes, giving it the greatest tonal range possible. Hence its three dimensional surface structure making it impervious to IR dust reduction.
Very difficult process, never entirely perfect, but capable of incredible colour with the longest archival life of any colour film.
ToS
Speaking of Kodachrome again -- my uncle was a doc in the Korean episode for two tours of duty. After he passed in 2013 I found all his slides of the era -- it's incredible how they have remained true to life with very few succumbing to fungus.
Oh, he saved everything. The letters from nurses in Korea reveal that they were a frisky lot and MASH isn't far from the truth. I also have letters from his friends in the Army during WW-II while he was stationed state-side.
Oh, he saved everything. The letters from nurses in Korea reveal that they were a frisky lot and MASH isn't far from the truth. I also have letters from his friends in the Army during WW-II while he was stationed state-side.
The Value In Keeping Photo Collections Intact
Lucky lucky you - what a fantastic inheritance to have. I can imagine there are any number of amazing pictures in the collection that put together would make for quite an incredible story. I have strong feelings about the work of artistically untrained photographers being far more interesting and in some ways a lot more worthwhile than what is often called art photography. Your uncle's photographs are from a direct response to history as it was happening, and the lack of artifice will give them a sense of verity the envy of most professionals.
Glad to hear that the archive, including frisky letters, is completely intact.
Lucky lucky you - what a fantastic inheritance to have. I can imagine there are any number of amazing pictures in the collection that put together would make for quite an incredible story. I have strong feelings about the work of artistically untrained photographers being far more interesting and in some ways a lot more worthwhile than what is often called art photography. Your uncle's photographs are from a direct response to history as it was happening, and the lack of artifice will give them a sense of verity the envy of most professionals.
Glad to hear that the archive, including frisky letters, is completely intact.
Setting Up A Scanning Workstation
It is surprising how little it takes to get set up to scan film, slides, and negs. A table or desktop, free of dust, an anglepoise lamp fitted with a daylight balanced tube, and a photographic light box. The latter can be spendy or cheap. If it has a daylight balanced tube, I say go for cheap. You need a 4x magnifying loupe, which can also be ridiculously spendy, or get a simple fold up linen tester for a fraction of the cost. You now have a light above, and a light below to trap the film in your merciless glare.
Dust is not your friend. So get yourself a nice soft sable haired paintbrush for dislodging dust, and a can of compressed dust-off to blast away any particles. Never touch the brush hairs with your fingers, as it will transfer grease to the dust and make it stick - but not get knocked off.
Gloves, lint free cotton, and if it is hot and humid, wear nitrile gloves underneath to stop the cotton from wicking up sweat.
Zippo lighter fuel - aka naphtha, is what the industry uses to degrease negative, and evaporates off without leaving a residue.
Optical microfibre cleaning cloths used for cleaning spectacles, are ideal for carefully wiping away greasy fingerprints without scratching emulsion.
Sometimes there can be a stubborn bit of dirt that will defy everything except water. Use your breath. That's right, just breath on the film and gently wipe away the grit with a microfibre cloth. It will often take several attempts to do this - wipe, don't scrub. Wrap the cloth around a piece of card and use as a squeegee. Never touch the cloth with your bare fingers.
The scanner ........ whether it is a film scanner, desktop scanner, or digicam above a light box on a tripod, get all the optical surfaces clean. Connect up to your computer (SCSI, USB or FireWire) and install your flavour of scanning software - preferably VueScan, as it is both easy to use, and can be dialled in exactly to your own requirements. You don't really need a highly specced up computer. Just something reasonably fast with plenty of RAM and an external drive for file storage ........ and ....... oh yes, a monitor screen with some degree of calibration applied to it - more about this at a later time.
ToS
PS: sorry to have been a bit tardy on this thread of late, I have been dealing with a string of medical emergencies, and until today haven't really had the energy to write all that much.
It is surprising how little it takes to get set up to scan film, slides, and negs. A table or desktop, free of dust, an anglepoise lamp fitted with a daylight balanced tube, and a photographic light box. The latter can be spendy or cheap. If it has a daylight balanced tube, I say go for cheap. You need a 4x magnifying loupe, which can also be ridiculously spendy, or get a simple fold up linen tester for a fraction of the cost. You now have a light above, and a light below to trap the film in your merciless glare.
Dust is not your friend. So get yourself a nice soft sable haired paintbrush for dislodging dust, and a can of compressed dust-off to blast away any particles. Never touch the brush hairs with your fingers, as it will transfer grease to the dust and make it stick - but not get knocked off.
Gloves, lint free cotton, and if it is hot and humid, wear nitrile gloves underneath to stop the cotton from wicking up sweat.
Zippo lighter fuel - aka naphtha, is what the industry uses to degrease negative, and evaporates off without leaving a residue.
Optical microfibre cleaning cloths used for cleaning spectacles, are ideal for carefully wiping away greasy fingerprints without scratching emulsion.
Sometimes there can be a stubborn bit of dirt that will defy everything except water. Use your breath. That's right, just breath on the film and gently wipe away the grit with a microfibre cloth. It will often take several attempts to do this - wipe, don't scrub. Wrap the cloth around a piece of card and use as a squeegee. Never touch the cloth with your bare fingers.
The scanner ........ whether it is a film scanner, desktop scanner, or digicam above a light box on a tripod, get all the optical surfaces clean. Connect up to your computer (SCSI, USB or FireWire) and install your flavour of scanning software - preferably VueScan, as it is both easy to use, and can be dialled in exactly to your own requirements. You don't really need a highly specced up computer. Just something reasonably fast with plenty of RAM and an external drive for file storage ........ and ....... oh yes, a monitor screen with some degree of calibration applied to it - more about this at a later time.
ToS
PS: sorry to have been a bit tardy on this thread of late, I have been dealing with a string of medical emergencies, and until today haven't really had the energy to write all that much.
Scanner Colour Theory
OK, you've got your scanning workstation setup and ready to go, but first some colour theory. Groan ...... yes, I know, but you need some grips for your boots!
All scanners operate in RGB, that is: they utilise the three primary colours of light, namely red, green and blue. All three mixed together make up what we see as white light. Surprisingly (perhaps) there are more shades of green than there are of red, and more shades of red than there are of blue. This explains why vegetative foliage is green, because as it reflects green, it is absorbing both red and blue light.
Like with digital sound recordings, photographic scans are made up from what we could call 'organised noise'. If we look at the separate RGB channels of a typical good quality scan, there is virtually no noise in the green channel, some noise in the red, and quite a lot of mush in the blue channel. A typical sky area in a landscape photograph contains mostly blue (and if viewed in CMYK mode - that is: cyan, magenta, yellow and black) is mixed with a little bit of cyan and yellow, but with scarcely any red or green (which when combined together make up the secondary colours of cyan and yellow). I trust this makes sense.
Which brings us to the realisation that all of the spectrum of secondary colours that make up CMYK (think colour negatives) are actually contained within the spectrum of primary colours of RGB (think of colour transparencies)......interesting - eh, what?
As most film or desktop scanners typically operate within what is known as 16bit mode, and most inkjet printers operate in 8bit mode, we have to understand what this actually means in terms of achieving accurate colour when either scanning or printing, but for now, let's stick to scanning. In 16bit RGB mode there are 65,536 shades of grey between true black and pure white per channel. In 8bit mode there are only 256 shades of grey per channel. It makes sense to scan and colour correct in 16bit, and then to convert to 8bit, as the math involved makes for a far smoother result, than trying to do everything in 8bit mode, as the result would otherwise be a crunchy, bandy mess full of unwanted noise. An analogy would be recording and editing sound in 96bit before converting to 16bit for audio reproduction.......smooooth!
No colour negative, or transparency, or B&W neg contains all of the colours to be found in a 16bit colour space - not even close. Instead, if we think of a 16bit colour space as a three dimensional pyramid shaped entity, with the three bottom corners representing red, green and blue light and the apex of the pyramid representing the sum of all three as pure white light - that is: the phenomenon known as 'luminosity' .... then it makes sense to see the colour space of a typical film emulsion as a somewhat smaller pyramid nestling inside a much larger one. The idea is to accurately capture the colours in a piece of film, and edit it within this bigger colour space - so as to give a convincingly real illusion of true colour fidelity when finally converted to 8bit mode for printing.
So, when we scan in 16bit mode, what we are aiming for is to record all of the data from the scanner as a data dump from the scanner head called a RAW file, and inside the RAW file is the discrete data that describes the picture. If you open up a 16bit RAW file inside Photoshop, it usually looks pretty dark and uninviting, and this is why we edit our scanner RAW files inside something made fit for purpose, such as VueScan.
If you understand sound, you will be able to understand light and colour.
If you haven't already got VueScan, now is the time - it's brilliant!
Here is the link VueScan Scanner Software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
More later. ToS
OK, you've got your scanning workstation setup and ready to go, but first some colour theory. Groan ...... yes, I know, but you need some grips for your boots!
All scanners operate in RGB, that is: they utilise the three primary colours of light, namely red, green and blue. All three mixed together make up what we see as white light. Surprisingly (perhaps) there are more shades of green than there are of red, and more shades of red than there are of blue. This explains why vegetative foliage is green, because as it reflects green, it is absorbing both red and blue light.
Like with digital sound recordings, photographic scans are made up from what we could call 'organised noise'. If we look at the separate RGB channels of a typical good quality scan, there is virtually no noise in the green channel, some noise in the red, and quite a lot of mush in the blue channel. A typical sky area in a landscape photograph contains mostly blue (and if viewed in CMYK mode - that is: cyan, magenta, yellow and black) is mixed with a little bit of cyan and yellow, but with scarcely any red or green (which when combined together make up the secondary colours of cyan and yellow). I trust this makes sense.
Which brings us to the realisation that all of the spectrum of secondary colours that make up CMYK (think colour negatives) are actually contained within the spectrum of primary colours of RGB (think of colour transparencies)......interesting - eh, what?
As most film or desktop scanners typically operate within what is known as 16bit mode, and most inkjet printers operate in 8bit mode, we have to understand what this actually means in terms of achieving accurate colour when either scanning or printing, but for now, let's stick to scanning. In 16bit RGB mode there are 65,536 shades of grey between true black and pure white per channel. In 8bit mode there are only 256 shades of grey per channel. It makes sense to scan and colour correct in 16bit, and then to convert to 8bit, as the math involved makes for a far smoother result, than trying to do everything in 8bit mode, as the result would otherwise be a crunchy, bandy mess full of unwanted noise. An analogy would be recording and editing sound in 96bit before converting to 16bit for audio reproduction.......smooooth!
No colour negative, or transparency, or B&W neg contains all of the colours to be found in a 16bit colour space - not even close. Instead, if we think of a 16bit colour space as a three dimensional pyramid shaped entity, with the three bottom corners representing red, green and blue light and the apex of the pyramid representing the sum of all three as pure white light - that is: the phenomenon known as 'luminosity' .... then it makes sense to see the colour space of a typical film emulsion as a somewhat smaller pyramid nestling inside a much larger one. The idea is to accurately capture the colours in a piece of film, and edit it within this bigger colour space - so as to give a convincingly real illusion of true colour fidelity when finally converted to 8bit mode for printing.
So, when we scan in 16bit mode, what we are aiming for is to record all of the data from the scanner as a data dump from the scanner head called a RAW file, and inside the RAW file is the discrete data that describes the picture. If you open up a 16bit RAW file inside Photoshop, it usually looks pretty dark and uninviting, and this is why we edit our scanner RAW files inside something made fit for purpose, such as VueScan.
If you understand sound, you will be able to understand light and colour.
If you haven't already got VueScan, now is the time - it's brilliant!
Here is the link VueScan Scanner Software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
More later. ToS
I can remember downloading the watermarked try before you buy version of Vuescan and could see no advantage over the Nikon software. Once you start getting into Photoshop and RAW, I would say, you have left the realms of simple slide copying.
I'm using Jpeg scans with Irfanview, a free programme to do the processing.
I'm using Jpeg scans with Irfanview, a free programme to do the processing.
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