scanning with dslr see pixels lighttable

“Colour” in this context includes grayscale (“Black and White” – B&W). The quality of tonal gradation and colour depends on the correctness of the analog film exposure and the digital exposure of the film media. Perceived sharpness of a digitally converted negative, a property combining resolution and contrast, partly depends on the film chemistry and its processing, the quality of lenses and focus for both the original analog capture and the digital capture of the film, the parallelism and flatness of field of the digitizing set-up and the extent of magnification from negative to print. In the digital context, apparent resolution depends on the number of pixels per inch, and on seeing differences of tone or colour between adjacent pixels (Figure 2). I’ll begin this article with brief remarks about these photographic properties, to be explored in more depth further on. The usual telltale items in making such assessments would be, for example, the colours of foliage, skies, objects that are supposed to be gray or near-gray and skin tones. The photographs were made decades ago, and I have no precise recollection of scene accuracy and certainly no measurements, but the photographs bring back memories of the subject and I can tell whether the digital renditions of the colours I’m obtaining are credible and pleasing. Notice I did not say “accuracy” of colour rendition, because for the negatives I am converting there is no such thing.

Primary factors I take into account for processing negatives are the inherent photographic properties of resolution, perceived sharpness, quality of tonal gradation, and credibility of colour rendition. Negative Conversion with Negative Lab Pro (The full work-up of this photo is laid-out in Annex 2) As well, I have substantially revised my whole set-up and workflow since the “LuLa” article. This article delves more into the technical aspects of set-up and capture, with a major focus on my workflow and findings using Negative Lab Pro (NLP – Figure 1) for converting digital negatives to positives. My previous article about this subject co-authored with Todd Shaner and published on, explored alternative techniques for processing colour negatives photographed with a camera (mirrorless or DSLR). My setup is roughly the same as the one you can see in the DAM book forums, although if you scour the web, you can find numerous other variations that should also work.Digitizing Negatives with a Camera: Revisited Introduction: I'm just waiting for Canon to ship the 1Ds4, since I think there might be just a tad more detail in the slide than the 5D2 can capture. And yes, the speed advantage is not to be overlooked. The only real downside is dust on the slides, which is a problem with most scanners too.

A Nikon 5000 scan is roughly 120MB, whereas a 5D2 dupe is about 30MB. I can say definitively that the DSLR dupes have far less grain than typical scans. I'm intrigued by Roger's comment about linear conversion and will definitely give that a try. I'm using an Alien Bees 1600 with a large soft box as my light source.

The 5D2 produces pretty decent results, but you really have to watch the exposure to avoid pixel blooming, where blown out highlights bleed into adjacent areas. Over the years, I've tried everything under the sun to make decent scans, but I've never found anything that made me happy. I did some quick experiments this summer using a 5D2 and the 100/2.8L macro to dupe some old Kodachromes.

Scanning with dslr see pixels lighttable