Printing from 35mm film negs.

[sam3]

I have a collection of 35mm film negatives I would like to print from.

Can someone recommend a scanner that will download to my computer .

Is there software on AP that I will be able to use to process the neg and print out.

[dasigna]

there used to be dedicated film-scanners if that is what you are searching for... had one of them some times ago, but thats only worth it if you would have a real huge amount of negatives. and yes, this one could batch-scan complete strips automatically and as well correct them and turn them to positives.

dont know whats out there at the moment for this task, but they used to be quite expensive.

 

if you only have to scan some of the negatives i would recommend doing this manually with a common flatbed-scanner and then maybe at least do some batch-processing within AP?

alternatively there are suppliers here and there who can do this for you at an affordable price. maybe you have the chance find one next to you?

[Chris.R]

I have a collection of 35mm film negatives I would like to print from.

Can someone recommend a scanner that will download to my computer .

Is there software on AP that I will be able to use to process the neg and print out.

 

Sam, the best approach would be heavily dependent on how many negatives, and to a lesser extent whether they are black and white or colour. Also what print sizes you have in mind.

 

If you have a lot of negatives, there are still some very good scanners still available. There are also some very bad ones. I'd suggest NOT getting one of those stand-alone scanners that puts images on a SD card; they might be just about OK for black and white, but they can give some very poor results for colour negatives, as they have no way of adjusting for the different orange masks that are needed for different films. An ordinary flat bed scanner (eg an all-in-one printer scanner) will not give particularly good results, as it works by reflective light and you need to transmit light for good results from negatives.

 

I bought one of the ones I'm NOT recommending (a Veho I think) but within a week realised how poor it was, particularly with light leaks as well as weird colours. Luckily I was able to send it back to Amazon for free because of the faults. I then bought a Plustek 7500i; there is an equivalent model still available, but over £200 unless you can get a good second hand one (which does happen, as people buy them, scan a collection then sell them on). This is a dedicated 35mm film scanner. It's pretty good quality but slow. I most often scan at 2400 ppi, which gives an image around 2400*3600 pixels, theoretically printable at 10*8", although for most images you can comfortably go to A3 without noticing the difference. The other option, particularly if you have 120 film negatives, would be an Epson scanner like the V500, a bit cheaper and in a few ways lower quality, but they do have the ability to batch scan a strip of up to 6 negatives, rather than moving a film holder through one frame at a time. Mind you, I also have one of these, for 120, and I've not managed to get the multi-frame scanning to work properly yet!

 

If you buy a Plustek you will also get Silverfast scanner software, very powerful but complicated and confusing. If you buy the Epson you'll get Epson Scan, which I've not used. I've ditched both of these for Vuescan Pro, which works with pretty much all scanners including all-in-one printer-scanners and is a bit more intuitive in my view.

 

I'm still shooting film, so my workflow for black and white is:

 

a) shoot the roll

b) home dev it, no darkroom required other than a dark change bag for putting the film in the tank, or (in my case) a Rondinax daylight tank

c) after the negs are dry and have sat under a heavy book in their sleeves for a day or so, scan the roll. I pay attention to each frame and scan the poor ones at perhaps 600 ppi just as a record, most of the better ones at 2400, and if there's one I really like the look of, I might scan it at 3600 ppi.

d) import the scans into a project in Aperture, post process as required, and print from Aperture. AP would get called from Aperture as an external editor as required.

 

Obviously you don't need to use Aperture or an equivalent, you could just work on images from the folder created by the scanner software using AP. BTW I use file naming record information about the roll like film type, camera, location etc.

 

When I was scanning the thousands of old negatives and slides the approach was pretty much the same.

 

A word on colour negatives... if you've got them it's definitely worth scanning them, but I find colour accuracy is a bit random, and my colour management capabilities are not good. So for new colour films, I get them processed and scanned by Filmdev, £5 a roll for process and medium scan (around 2000 ppi), turned round in a day usually. Good quality. The pain is posting a roll to them; they theoretically don't fit in a large letter, so it's small packet at £3.35!

 

Slides can also be a problem, although usually less so. The issue here can be blocked up shadows and out of gamut colours, but results can still be pretty good. If I have a cracker I wanted to print big I'd send it off for a drum scan, much more expensive.

 

So you can see, it could be expensive, and one of the services that will scan existing negatives for you might be a cheaper option if you don't have too many. But that route will also get expensive if you have a lot. I contemplated weeding and only getting the best scanned externally, but soon realised I can't judge a negative without scanning it in the first place, plus taking out frames and sending them off will play havoc with any filing system you might have!

 

This is probably a bit off topic for Affinity; I'd suggest dropping in to Talk Photography, where there's an active and supportive Film & Conventional sub-forum.

[sam3]

Thanks Guys ,will try my normal scanner.

Sam

[dasigna]

oh my god... theres something i forgot to mention:

 

the scanner has to have back-lit functionality - otherwise it wont work for film! sorry not to mention that before -_-