Digitizing 35mm film

Good day, probably each of us has a lot of old film. So recently, I decided to take and digitize it, and at the same time share with you what I got out of this. So, in this article I want to show and tell how you can assemble a home photo laboratory from practically available tools, in particular, it will be considered how to digitize: color, black and white positive and negative film. The goal is to digitize more than 1000 frames. The quality requirement is very high. At the end of the article I will touch on the digitization of slides.

If you are still interested, welcome to cat.

To begin with, you need to collect everything you need, below I will give a list of necessary, but not mandatory, why I will tell you so further.

What you need:
- digital SLR camera (DSLR)
- flash (powerful light source)
- lens 50mm-80mm
- macro rings
- enlarger
- softbox
- soft to DSLR
- usb-mini usb cable You

may need:
- adapter ring M42
- sync cable for flash
- slide adapter
- adhesive tape
- flashlight

Let's start preparation of the workplace, we collect the enlarger, it is most convenient to put it next to the PC.

Assembled photo enlarger.


Red circled what needs to be removed because interferes with the installation of the camera.
Let's move on to the lens, here everyone will have an individual, I’ll only say that you can use almost any lens (both standard and third-party), preferably with a fixed focal length from 50mm to 80mm (not zoom), it’s better to try different ones, because the lens can distorting colors, I used an old Soviet “Zenith-m 1.7 / 50” through an M42 adapter ring and two macro rings that had long been gathering dust in a box next to this lens. Macro rings are selected empirically, more on that later.



We turn to the assembly of the softbox, it will be used as a background. In my case, it was homemade, I took the first box I got, cut out two holes in it, one for the flash, the other for setting the background, inside the box I put two sheets of white paper for better reflection.



No matter how trite it may sound, as a background I used a cookie tray, secured it to tape, it looks something like this.



Gives a very soft, even and diffused light, what you need. With plain white paper, instead of a background, you won’t get such light, in the worst case, the villi will be visible.



A flash was used as a light source, I believe that this is the most successful choice, because The flash has several advantages:
- you can adjust the power
- powerful light makes it possible to shoot at fast shutter speeds and with a closed aperture
But this does not mean that you can not use other sources, it seems to me that diode panels will also show a good result.



Well, in small steps, we move on from preparation for tuning. So, now it’s a very crucial moment, you need to pick up macro rings and adjust focus, everything depends on this stage. I also want to note that any camera with interchangeable optics, whether it is CANON or SONY, is suitable for the quality of the picture, it has practically no effect on it, it is very good if it has a Live View mode. The only difference in the cameras will be if you use crop or fullframe - although all this is corrected with macro rings, in my case as a canon eos 7d carcass it is a cropped camera and I use two macro rings, one large, the other small. Just remember that the more rings the larger the increase.

To select the rings, remove the slide adapter from the enlarger and fix the film in it, select the sharpest frame, then make the backlight for the slide adapter, then everything is very simple, I personally used my phone, opened a white screen on it and set the shutdown timeout display to the maximum, it turns out a kind of preview in the process of digitization so he used it.





We stand vertically above the table and aim for sharpness, we look so that the frame is not cropped, if cropped, you need to either reduce the number of rings, or put a shorter ring and vice versa. Personally, I neglected this rule and allowed myself to crop the frame a bit, it turned out that approximately 2-3 mm from the width and height were cut i.e. in fact, I did not shoot the frame 36x24mm, but 34x22, I do not consider this critical. although it would be possible to take the whole frame, and later crop in the editor. We have decided on the rings, the floor is done, remove the eyecup from the camera, put it into manual mode (put the disk on the canon in “M”), turn off the auto focus on the lens, connect it to the computer and put it vertically under the enlarger, insert the slide adapter with the film.



We start remote control of the camera and catch the focus as best as possible by moving the enlarger up or down. For a more accurate focus, I opened the aperture to the maximum (f1.7) and additionally illuminated it with a flashlight.



Having caught the sharpness, I tightened all the nuts on the enlarger, switched to a finer adjustment of the focus, made a digital zoom in the Live View mode and already caught the perfect focus with the focus ring on the lens, after which I closed the aperture to the maximum (f16) in order to maximize sharpness and have a margin inaccuracies.

We install the softbox and connect the flash to the camera, I had a built-in flash as the leading flash, you can also connect it via the sync cable. The assembly looks like this:



Now I turn to setting up the camera, all shooting will be carried out completely in manual mode, I also transfer the flash to manual mode. We set ISO100, if it is possible to set less, then this is good, shutter speed 1 / 250s is the shortest shutter speed for working with the flash, for some it can be 1 / 125s, check the aperture again, I have written f1.4, a lie in fact f16 , the shooting format I chose RAW those who know what they’ll understand, those who don’t know, shoot in JPEG, about the white balance (BB) I’ll talk separately for each type of film, until I set the Kelvin temperature , we ’ll take a picture in the settings it was immediately saved on the computer, well, like everything was left to press the shutter button.



I’ve moved a little away from the topic to view the finished photo. I used the FastStone Image Viewer program , it’s quite convenient, fast and free, it works especially well with RAW, but you can use other software, to taste and color ... By default, it has hot keys for inversion colors (Ctrl + I) and image rotation, left (L), right (R.), flip horizontally (Alt + R) and vertically (V). All this is very convenient and significantly speeds up the digitization process.

Let's get back to digitization, I'll start with the negatives (color and B / W).
For B / W negatives, we set the user image mode to monochrome in the camera settings. Color temperature does not play any role here, we don’t touch it. We can shoot.

For color, you can put a portrait, landscape or leave natural colors. Color temperature (BB) can be changed. In general, for most photos, 5500K is suitable, but it happens that after the inversion you see that the image is too warm, you want to add cold, then you need to raise the temperature, for example, to 6200-6500 or higher and vice versa (shooting in RAW this can be done later in lightroom or photoshop).

The most important rule for successful digitization is to calculate the flash power and choose the right BB.

The negative film:
1. The more light when shooting, the darker it will be in the end and vice versa.
It turns out that if you took a picture, inverted it and keep it clearly overexposed, then you need to add flash power.
2. The higher the temperature, the lower it will be in the finished image and vice versa.
Honestly often confused.

With a positive film, everything is simpler, here the more light the brighter and the higher the color temperature the warmer.

A couple of examples:

B / W negative.


Moscow. 1974 year. Color negative.


Moscow. Color positive.




To summarize, I personally am satisfied with the result, not inferior to scanners, if only in resolution, but this is a matter of technology, with an increase in my images to 100% the grain of the film is visible, I think it’s better not to go anywhere. In general, for the most part, the quality of photographs depends on the film. Perhaps from this topic it seems that this is complicated and long, but in fact, knowing the above, I do the preparations for the shooting in 10 minutes and the shooting process is pretty debugged, eventually the hands get used to, in about 3 days (5 days a day) -7 hours) I shot 1500 frames. I do not touch on the topic of post processing.

As promised, I will say a few words about the digitization of the slides. In general, the same rules apply for slides that I described above, the only thing is that you do not need a photographic enlarger.



The hardest part about digitizing slides is the slide adapter and where to get it. Personally, I took it from a Soviet projector and wrapped it with adhesive tape to the cookie tray already familiar to us (it just rolls around) and a little more adhesive tape was left to wrap this miracle in a book in order to level it with the softbox.



We put the softbox, the camera on a tripod, the main thing here is to observe flatness.

(the photos are conditional in nature, it’s not worth it for me)




The result should be like this:


The distance from the softbox to the slide is 20-30 cm, if white glare appears on the film during shooting and you are sure that this is not a film defect, try moving the softbox away go further or flip the slide.
Everything else is the same as with the enlarger.

PS
All the necessary software for your camera, you can download from the official website.
Using these links you can see examples of photos in real size 18MP:
Example
No.
1
Example No. 2 Example No. 3 Example No. 4

UPD: I want to add a little about the aperture. I always thought that the more closed the sharper, thanks to everyone who pointed out this error, you directly opened my eyes to the world. But everything turned out to be not so simple, I retook one frame on f5, f7, f9, f11 and f16, it really turned out the sharpest on f7, but there is also a drop in sharpness and optical distortion at the corners of the frame. I’ll say right away the film is flat and pressed against the glass, plus to everything, I turned it over and tried different frames. So in my opinion the best option was on f9. Below I show what happened in a 100% increase.

f7


f9


f16


Thank you for your attention. I will be glad to objective criticism, as well as ready to answer questions of interest.

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