Film Scanning Tips for Epson Perfection Scanners

hey viewers Nick Carver here and this is a tutorial on how to scan film using your Epson perfection film scanner so whether it's v700 v7 5850 whatever you got we're looking at how to scan film on it now we're not doing a fluid mount scan today I'm actually going to do a separate video just on how to wet mount scan using your Epson today we're doing what I would call quick and dirty scans the wet mount scanning yields better results but it is very and time consuming and it's it's a lot of work so when you get a new roll of film back you got to get that baby out man you got to post it on your instant bucks and you're faced to grams right away so we can't be doing a fluid mount on every single every single scan so we're looking at a dry scanning today it's gonna yield excellent results it's just not quite as good as a wet mount scan now these scans are going to be plenty big for posting to your website sharing on social media and you'll even be able to print from them you just can't print huge you know if you're gonna do a six foot wide piece you want to do a wet mount scan or get a drum scan made but these would be good for you know medium to small size prints by the way you like my light table cover I have a matching Epson cover both are made by stone photo gear he's a great guy who does great work makes all sorts of cool pouches and things for us film shooters so if you want to get yourself a nice Epson dust cover check out stone photo gear mine fits him like a glove we're still doing ace ventura right now we will be using the film trays that come with your Epson it seems like people rag on these but I think it's just because they haven't unleashed their full potential there's something about these trays that is very very very important to know in order to get the best quality scan and it seems like nobody knows about it so let's take a look at the backside of the tray here you'll notice on each one of these trays there's these these little feet on the backside and they're all point they all have an arrow on and they're all pointing the same direction right now mine are all pointing towards a zero mark these little feet here they actually pop out and you can either leave them out or put them back in the other direction these feet or how you adjust the focus on your scan basically when they're all pointed towards zero this tray is basically at the factory setting in terms of scan height focus height and that might not be exactly what you need because as great as these scanners are there's minor differences between them when they manufacture them they can't make them all perfect so if you were to take all these feet out turn them around and point them towards the plus it will raise your scan just slightly to change the focus if you were to take these feet and pull them all out and just leave them out it will lower your scan just a little so it's really important to get these things set right and you just have to do it through trial and error try a scan at zero try it at Plus try it with the the feet out completely so out of - see which one looks best I know that on my scanner I get the best results at plus so as you'll see on this image here - is definitely soft it's not perfectly in focus zero is pretty good but plus is a little bit better it's not a huge difference but it's enough to make me want to put them all at plus and I get better results than just leaving it at zero so today I'm going to be scanning a piece of 645 medium format color negative film and I shot this image actually we're gonna scan two pictures here I shot these images in Maui using a Fuji GA 645 Zi which is a fun little medium format kind of point-and-shoot camera that's why I like about its like medium format point shoot now when you load up the film in the tray here be sure to put it facedown so in other words you want the the film brand written across the top like mine says Kodak you want that to be reversed you want to be looking at the image from behind so place it facedown but it up to the edge of the tray so that the black border around the image is mostly covered and then what I like to do actually is I've cut out these little pieces of black construction paper and I typically lay these over the the border of the last frame just like so and I do that for a couple reasons one it gives it a little more rigidity when I collapse it the the front the film will flatten out a little bit better on the end but mainly I like to cover up the boundary between frames the the clear portion because you can actually get flare from the scanner light kind of creeping around the image and that will create a little bit of a glow around the edge sometimes so in fact if you're only scanning one photo it's not a bad idea to take a piece of construction paper like this and cover everything except the image you know cover up the border cover up the other photos and then that way you're only seeing just the image you're planning on scanning and that will minimize any possibility of flare coming through but if you're planning on scanning all four negatives or any portion thereof I just like to cover the border on the last one all right now we're gonna blow it hit it with some air get the dust off I prefer an air rocket a hands Howard air rocket like this because if you use compressed air it is a lot more effective but you might get a little sprays coming out of it sometimes of the material you know the that stuff you don't want that hitting you're hitting your film this baby's right ready to load up so we're gonna drop it on the Epson power it up now the software I'm using to run my Epson is silver fast eight and this costs extra outside of buying the scanner it doesn't come with the scanner and I know it's it's hard to pull the trigger on you know spending extra money on software when the scanner comes with some software but I'm telling you if you get silver fast eight it's gonna make the process so much quicker so much easier you're gonna get much better results you know you don't want to spend all this money on film and lenses and cameras and going to the location and gas money and all this kind of stuff and then skimp at the very last minute get yourself a good piece where to run your scanner I can't recommend silver fast eight highly enough it has this great feature built into it called Nega fix stands for negative fixed and Nega fix basically you get to put in the film you're using so I'm gonna be putting in Kodak portray 400 and then it will automatically figure out the proper way to reverse the colors remove the color cast the orange color cast on color negatives and get me the right profile the right color balance everything it works really well and it dramatically speeds up additive time because you're not sitting in Photoshop fumbling around with the curves adjustment trying to eliminate color casts and driving yourself nuts because you see a color cast one second and you don't see it the next second but then you see it the second after that drive you insane trying to do it visually this thing will do it all automatically for you and it does a great job all right so I have silver fast pulled up here I'm going to start with the pre scan pre scan will warm up the scanner and do a low res scan so I can see what I'm actually looking at here all right here it comes okay so a few things we got to get set up here on the upper left first off you got to choose transparency not reflective that's for if you're scanning Polaroids or documents and not wide transparency wide transparency is for when you're scanning film directly on the scanner glass I do not recommend scanning the film directly on a scanner glass for a few reasons number one is the skit the film likely won't stay perfectly flat unless it's sheet film so you'll end up with a warped image but more important than that if you put a dry negative just on the glass the glass surface like that you're likely to get something called Newton rings and Newton rings occur when two glossy surfaces come together and they kind of stick it creates these rainbow circles and kind of these concentric circles and swirls in your image from the two glossy surfaces coming together if you're doing a fluid mount that doesn't happen but since we're dry mounting we don't want to put it directly on a piece of glass like that so we're gonna choose transparency we're doing a negative of course but if you're doing you know Fuji Velvia Fuji Pro via or some sort of transparency film you would go to positive here instead of negative Kodachrome if you're doing Kodachrome if you have old Kodachrome film you're trying to scan evidently you got to put it on its own setting I don't know what that's about I guess Kodachrome scans weird or something like that so the software needs to know you're doing it under bit depth I'm gonna choose 48 bit that will give me a 16-bit TIFF file which is exactly what I want that'll give me more flexibility for editing the picture later on in Lightroom or Photoshop I'm gonna choose TIFF as the file format and the resolution here there's an important one so the resolution indicates you know how many pixels per inch it's gonna get from your negative you can put this at anything you want really but it all depends on how big you want the resulting file to be now just for ease of numbers let's say you have a negative that measures one inch by one inch so if you're holding it in front of you it's one inch by one inch and let's say you scan it at 2,400 PPI pixels per inch you're gonna end up with a scan of 2,400 pixels by 2,400 pixels if you put it at 4800 pixels per inch it's gonna be a 4800 pixels by 48 hundred pixels file so it all depends on how big you want the image to be I'd scan almost exclusively medium format and 6 by 17 so I have my PPI around 2400 and I find that's plenty big for web use blowing it up for prints you know up to maybe 16 by 20 plenty big for social media so I do 2,400 pixels per inch on a 645 negative like I'm about to scan that's going to give me about 18 to 19 megapixels of image if you're doing 35 millimeter film you might want to bump up that PPI a little bit because it's a smaller negative and if you want a bigger file you're gonna have to bump up the PPI I don't like to go much higher than 2400 because the files get huge you're going to clog up my hard drive and the scan takes longer I only go to higher PPI is when I'm scanning for a large print but since these are our quick and dirty scans I'm just gonna do two 2400 PPI that'll be plenty big for almost all of my purposes and then down below we get to negative X and this is where we get to put in the type of film we're using so I'm gonna put in from the vendor Kodak look at all the brands they have here it's awesome so I'm gonna put in Kodak film type again look at all the different films they have this thing's incredible I'm gonna put in portrait and this is 400 ISO so I'm gonna put in 400 but look at all the different options here I mean it's like there's not really a film you wouldn't find here unless it's a really obscure film I'm gonna uncheck CCR I'm gonna come back to that but now when we do Nega fix there's a really important thing to pay attention to here I was using negatives for a long time and I was getting terrible results it never seemed to give me consistent results the color cast were funky it's just like it wasn't doing what they claimed it did and I'm just like I have this things you know there's things at gamma kit doesn't actually work and then I went to the silver fast website and I read up on it I actually read the instructions imagine that and silver fast States not clearly but they do state this make sure the frame is within the image area not including any border so in other words if I'm gonna scan say image number two right here I need to make sure that my scanning frame this red box does not overlap the border of the image at all when I started scanning I was always including the border so I had my film area basically bigger than the image area because why not you know I'll fine tune it later I'll crop it later in Lightroom or Photoshop I might is no reason to get super nitpicky here I'll do that later little did I know that's why my results were so crappy so you need to take this scanning area this frame and pull it within the border otherwise Nega fix gets kind of confused and it doesn't do a good conversion in fact you'll see that when I snapped it in instantly colors look way better so don't include the border now under Nega fix you can adjust exposure of course if you see fit I would like this image just a little brighter so I'm gonna bring it up don't go too bright or too dark on this though you don't want to clip your blacks or your highlights in your scan if you can help it you can always clip blacks and highlights later if you want to but make sure your scan has all the details you need to work with tolerance if you adjust this this changes basically how the software detects the orange color the orange masking and your negative I'm a little unclear at what a higher number versus a lower number actually tells the software to do but basically just drag it high and drag it low and see how it affects the picture and then see if you can find something in between that works well for it like you'll see if I drag it too high here the highlights kind of blow out and I'm losing detail there and my histogram is clipping on the lower left or just below the negatives thing here it's clipping on the highlights if I go too low the highlights are kind of dull so I'm gonna bring it up a bit until I feel like it's a good representation of what I'm what I'm envisioning so I think that's pretty good there and then we have the ccr button click ccr if you want to hear some sweet tune skis Creedence Clearwater Revival come on CCR no nobody all right now CCR stands for color cast removal and if you click this on silver fast is gonna try to detect if there's any color cast in there that you might not want you'll see here when I clicked it on it realized there was too much of a blueish green tone and it just got rid of it did a great job so I don't really have to do any color correcting myself it's really really great saves a ton of time now CCR is a little bit of a dice roll sometimes occasionally when you click it it will eliminate a color cast that you actually wanted so just use it on a case-by-case basis when needed but I got my Nega fix section all worked out here below that we have picture settings we can adjust mid-tones or saturation I usually like to bring saturation up a little bit in the scan because I find my scans to be pretty low in saturation now this isn't Fuji Velvia so I'm not going to crank the saturation but I'm going to get it to what I feel is an accurate representation of kodak portrait below that I have unsharp masking I'm actually gonna turn that off by clicking the X here I'm going to sharpen the picture later in Photoshop now there's a ton of other tools here you know we have histogram gradation global CC s Rd X all this stuff I don't really use too many of them because much of it can be done later in Lightroom and Photoshop where I feel a little a little more comfortable with the controls but like if you feel the picture needs a little bit of warming up or cooling down I like global CC global color correction just has this awesome color wheel where you can pull the dot towards warm or pull it towards cool or towards green or magenta it's kind of a very easy visual way to adjust the color balance on your picture you can even isolate it down to just highlights by clicking 25 just mid-tones by clicking 50 just shadows by clicking 75 so you can work on the color cast just on those sections if needed or click the three bars to the left in order to affect the color cast on all the tones equally so like this picture I'm actually going to warm it up a bit I'm just pulling the dot towards kind of a yellowish orange color you can also do a tone curve gradation by the way any adjustment you make on a global color correction global CC is affecting the tone curve that's really what it's doing in fact you'll see right here if I adjust my global color correction you'll actually see the tone curve is going all over the place so they're the same tool they're just visualized differently I tend to find the global CC a little more intuitive and then one other tool I am going to use here is I SRD that's scratch and dust removal and the I stands for infrared the essence have a really cool feature where they can they can scan at an infrared wavelength and that can be used to basically eliminate dust from your picture it's a really awesome technology but if you turn on is Rd what'll happen is when you make your scan it's gonna make two passes the first pass is the regular scan and then it does a second pass but using the infrared wavelength of light and using that infrared wavelength it can actually kind of detect dust separate from the image dust and scratches and it can kind of make a map of all the dust on your picture and then subtract it from your picture it's really awesome it is really increased or sped up my post-production time because I'm not spending nearly as much time cleaning up dust it takes care of dusty images pretty damn well so I recommend using is Rd it increases the scanning time a little bit but it's not terrible so I got this scam pretty much ready to go it's looking great I don't think I'm gonna need to do much to it once I get it in Lightroom or Photoshop but I actually want to scan the image right next to it so with my frame selected I'm going to press command D or if you're on a PC control B that will duplicate the frame so that you can drag it over and since it's the same film should be pretty much the same adjustments but again I want to make sure my frame is not overlapping into the border at all otherwise Nega fix is going to get confused now this image looks a little too warm to me that's because of the global CC I used on the previous image got copy over but I'm gonna reset the global CC there we go that's a little cooler might even pull it a little more blue cool that's looking good alright so these two are ready to go and I'm gonna batch scan it normally what I do is if I bring up say two strips of film so I have eight images pulled up I'll put the bottle put a frame over each one of them all eight and then I'll batch scan them it'll run for me and I can go you know relax while this thing's going so I'm gonna go up to scan I'm gonna click and hold so I'm go to batch scan I'm just going to send these to the desktop because we're just kind of a trial run here I'm gonna create a folder just gonna call it Maui for these scans and go into that folder and I'm gonna title these Maui beach views and then I want it to add a zero one zero two zero three whatever at the end separated by a space I'm gonna click scan and it starts scanning process can sometimes take quite a while especially if you've got a really high PPI and it's a large negative but you know it's the way to go so pour yourself a cup of Jill sit back relax let the scanner do the work for you all right first one's done let's take a look at it all right now I'm gonna eventually bring this into Lightroom I prefer doing my edits in Lightroom because a it has excellent file management so I can find my my negatives easier but also I like the non-destructive editing aspect of it I don't have to worry about ever messing up my original raw scan but I am gonna bring it into Photoshop first for one reason and one reason only which is to sharpen it I recently discovered a smart sharpen in Photoshop and I know I'm a johnny-come-lately to this but if you go to filter sharpen smart sharpen it's incredible to me how well it sharpens the picture really improves the quality of your scan so filter smart sharpen and I'm gonna bring the amount up to I don't know maybe 150 or so do it on a case-by-case basis if your picture has a lot more details to it you can probably bring the amount up higher but if it's a lot of smooth areas maybe don't go so high it'll start to sharpen the grain the radius bring that up high if it's a large file don't go too high if it's a smaller file and there's a kind of a telltale sign that the radius is too high if you bring the radius too high you'll start to notice halos around things around edges so you'll see if we look at like these palm trees here they have these glowing edges that's the radius being too high so I'm gonna bring the radius down until those go away but I don't wanna go so low that the sharpening isn't really doing anything so I'm gonna bring the radius up until I see a little bit of haloing like right there and then I'm gonna back it off until that goes away good all right so smart sharpen is really really effective I'll show you I'm gonna look up at the palm tree fronds here there's with it off there's on so off on let's go to another part here there's off on off on you'll see the all the sand and the plants and the water here off on off on just really brings out the intricate details pretty impressive I'm gonna do okay to apply it click Save close it then I'm gonna do the same to the second file pull it into Photoshop and I'm gonna go up to filter sharpen smart sharpen oh man that's working wonders let's look at these buildings back here yeah it's crazy there's without there's with without and with the rocks - everything's way sharper so apply my smart sharpen save it close it now I'm going to bring them into Lightroom okay there we go we're gonna go to that folder okay so I'm gonna go over to develop here I don't need to do much to this picture because the the nega fix did most of the work for me they look pretty great but I think on this one I'm just going to to move the black point a little bit I'm going to deepen up the blacks slightly and I'm also going to push the highlights just a little higher so I'm going to basically add some contrast that's really what I'm doing here so I'm gonna reduce the blacks then push the whites up so here's before and after before and after very minor I'm also gonna try pushing the highlights up so that all these layers back here a little brighter for after I do want to increase the colors a little bit I feel like it should be a little more colorful I'm gonna boost vibrance first and then saturation the difference between those two by the way vibrance a will leave skin tones alone so if you're doing portraits much better to boot much better to boost vibrance and saturation saturation will make skin tones look yellow and pinkish or whatever but vibrance is also smarter than saturation and that it kind of identifies the weaker colors and affects those more so if it identifies that the blues and greens are weakest it's gonna push those harder where if it identifies maybe the yellows are weakest it's going to push those a little harder it does affect blues and greens most though simply because it's trying to leave skin tones alone which are in the yellow red color spectrum so I'm going to boost vibrance first to kind of bring up the weaker colors and then saturation on top of that to push them all up so again here's before and after so very minor change you know I'd really just boosted the contrast a bit boosted the color a little bit now I just want to show you I'm gonna zoom in notice anything missing there's no dust baby that is Rd works so well my negatives always have dust on them and I'm a clean guy but you just can't avoid dust on a negative so I highly recommend you use is our D on your color color film unfortunately is our D doesn't work on black and white film in fact if you try and select it on a black and white film I believe it'll tell you hey you can't do the infrared it doesn't go through black and white film like it does color so unfortunately not so much on black and white film but on color film really reduces how much dust cleanup you're gonna have to do later but this image is looking pretty good I push the blacks just a little lower there we go I'm liking that now of course if I want to adjust the temperature intent I would do that under white balance but I think it's looking pretty good I'm gonna copy these settings to the next picture because they are the same film in the same location I got to rotate this command bracket bracket laughter bracket write or control bracket will rotate now I'm gonna paste there we go looking good this one I might make a little bluer just gonna take the temperature and drop it down all right there you go two scans easy peasy lemon squeezy now I've been calling these quick and dirty scans simply because we're not doing the whole wet mounting thing but really they're just quick they're not dirty baby these things are clean they're good looking scans they're sharp so don't be afraid to use those scanner trays and do some dry scans just if you're gonna print up a wall mural get a better quality scan do some wet mounting or something like that all right thanks for watching have fun scanning out there kids be safe see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Nick Carver

Views: 434,568

Rating: 4.8982358 out of 5

Keywords: Epson V700, Epson V750, Epson V800, Epson V850, Film Scanning, Film Photography, Silverfast, Silverfast AI Studio, Silverfast 8, Scanning, Analog Photography, Photography Tutorials, Scanning Tips, Epson Perfection Pro, Dry Scanning, Scanning Tutorials, Nick Carver

Id: qtpmlEeJodw

Length: 28min 11sec (1691 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 10 2018