How I Scan and Process Color Film w/ Silverfast and Negative Lab Pro

hi my name is ben sharples i'm a dp and photographer from massachusetts today i'll be showing you how i scan and process my own film photography today i'll be using 35 millimeter film i shot this on a fe with like a 50 millimeter lens um and i think it is um fuji superior 400 iso found it's like cheap film you can get it around like five six bucks a roll for starters i'm using silver fast eight which is a pretty rock solid scanning software i've used epson scan view scan and then now silverfest i've been shooting film for about four to five years uh mostly 35 i just picked up a 120 film camera so at the end of this video you should be able to see about two methods that i i feel work best for color film um and it'd be up to you which one you want to choose and both have their positives and negatives over the years i've kind of come to the conclusions on certain up certain ones and right now i'm at this moment i prefer using uh negative lab pro and scanning positives but it really depends on the film stock you're using and situations that you're shooting your film stock in and how you're editing it and how you're scanning it there's a lot of permutations so for starters open up silver fast um i got a positive 48 to 24 bit um you just delete all frames so it's completely reset and you'll see um all the settings in silver fast are saved to each frame so this right now is one frame so just leave it as is and you can load in your film make sure your color film is facing the information on the film strip is facing opposite to you so if you read fuji superior 400 it needs to be backwards facing you as you're putting it on the scanner so it would be facing normal back towards down scanner um for me i tend to just use the normal epson film strips holder that it comes with i also have a strip of a r glass um which eliminates newton rings when you put the film right on the glass but uh it also works well as a sliding right into the epson holder so sometimes i'll put the 35 millimeter film in the holder and then i put the a in our glass over and it keeps it completely flush i mean even if you don't have that you can easily use um a bit of paper on either end to press in between the uh the snap-on holder so otherwise set the free scan [Music] okay so right here i have about five five thirty thirty five millimeter frames i'm actually interested in taking one of these and making it into a small print so i'm going to go after that one first so click and drag this the frame selector right here and you're just going to want to hover around the borders right about there um and then we can just do a zoom in right here you just click this button so here it gives me the full preview scan i actually love this because um not a lot of software's do this i'm pretty sure if you scan apps and they'll do this as well and i can easily now just see everything clearly so i can just drag in my borders and get it perfect and since i'm going to be taking this to lightroom and i'm going to convert it with negative lab pro i need some of these borders in there just just in case i can already see some dusting but it's nothing major so if you go over here i go to the destination where i want to put the files um i have a simple structure like this where i disregard the plugins folder but i have it by years that i've been shooting and 2020 these are like all the various trips or usually i mean most people when we shoot film we end up shooting the whole film in one day so it usually comes down to a location so this is new hampshire francona the francona range and the white mountains of new hampshire it's a great area so i'm gonna go over to the youtube video which we're working on right now and i have it as insta lrc which is lightroom and then tiff's so i'm going to go right over the tip so i'm just going to put it here because it's going to scan me a positive tiff um i find organizing your photos into a location base or project base and then going in and then just put them in subfolders based on the file format that they're at i find that's the easiest way to do it and when you archive your film and you put them in film sheets just write the same name that you have for that folder on the sheet and then put the sheet in because most sheets will fit a whole royal film uh especially if it's 36 shots i just could do img for image it's just gonna auto number it uh and then right here for resolution since this is gonna be a print i'm gonna go higher so i'm gonna go 3200 ppi um a lot of the work for me turning this in print might be in a future video but for now i'm gonna do 3200 ppi and don't worry about this preset right here it just says 300 ppi but it's it doesn't matter it's actually going to scan it at 3200 and you'll see right here it's giving me an estimate file size so down here this is an important thing i saw this in a nick carver video i mean you should definitely check out nick carver's channel if you're a fan of film photography uh so right here go to unsharp masting it's gonna put up on sharp mask on this it's gonna try to sharpen the negative but what happens here is it's not as good as what you can get out of like let's say lightroom or photoshop so i would get rid of that um we don't wanna adjust anything on the exposure at all for this positive we want to keep it as is and then you you could use this if you if you're converting it to color this is the dust removal software this works great i'll show you this later in the video but for now you don't want to use this on the positive because it'll cause issues um and yeah so this is good to go and then just head over to you can scan right here scan over here give it a scan and zoom ahead alright so when it's done you'll see right here you can just click this box it'll pop right up i mean by the way i'm on windows so some of this stuff might be different for this for you mac users out there but that looked completely clean to me so now i'm going to go over to lightroom make a catalog for this i mean your lightroom organization is your own is your own right and then go to import uh i think it had it oh that's wrong so it's 2020. nh francona open this up youtube video tips it's right there i'm just going to do a one-to-one preview just takes a second on this on this machine import all right so this is good i don't need to do any rotation so as we can see here we go if we zoom in everything's looking pretty good so here's where people disagree on the use of negative live pro um this negative has to get white balanced so there's multiple ways i can do this um so this software up here negative lab pro is a it's a plugin that you can buy you can easily look it online it's about a hundred dollars it's totally worth the money 100 worth of money if you're regularly shooting film and you're not a fan of converting and scanning software whether it's silver fast view scan or epson scan this is the next best thing this this will do it so you can do tiff's scan prep right here let me pull this over uh you have all these options i'm gonna go with um epson scan mac which is basically just importing an epson gamma which is what i just scanned with an epson scanner and i can hit make and it's just gonna it's basically just copying and making another big tiff file and then auto converting it and you go to all photographs over here and then here we go so for a negative lab pro to work the best you want the borders out of the way so there's a shortcut for negative left pro you can do control alt n if you're on pc i think it's control command n on mac and then here we go you gotta get rid of that black and white so you have your source right here which is a tiffscan color module uh i go with frontier which is in my opinion the best looking scan preset on here and then pre-saturation i'm just gonna do default three and if i had the borders in there i could put like a five percent of the image border buffer or whatever but it's so easy to just do the conversion now and then you can just go over to the uh go over to the crop and crop back out to the borders so i'm going to convert negatives and voila so i have a lot of settings in here so i'm going to reset uh you can go to something like all softs if you wanted to really start from a nice space but i i find linear deep is actually a very strong um starting point so let me save this for now come back to this second but i've actually noticed recently that i get the best results not using the tif scan prep and then i would just do this so i go in and then i get a white bounce right here and i go to auto and this looks a lot different than what the negative was just at and now i'm going to do control alt and again pull up negative lab same thing frontier 3 default pre-saturation i'm going to convert the neg and i'm going to reset this i'm going to go to linear deep you can fiddle with the soft highs and lows i mean if you just it's hard to see with the youtube compression but it is a subtle look uh me personally i'm actually not really fond of the all soft like pastel overexposed look that we commonly see on instagram so here i'm to make it a little more contrasty i guess pull the darks in a bit and the whites make those [Music] and down here you can do the mid tones highlights shadows and adjust the color balance of each i've noticed that this is very iffy so if i go over to the mids and i start to pull in some green it starts to happen very rapidly it entirely depends on the negative they're using but some of them will just entirely break once you start messing with them i was getting some extreme magenta cast on a old fujifilm roll recently [Music] um this was also the fall season in new hampshire so this is all autumn trees up here um so that exaggerated reddish orange look is kind of something i dig for this zone of season so down here they have the sharpen settings if you just hit that blue zoom you can see it there's off and then there's lab scan i've actually noticed recently that this this sharpened by them is actually not that strong so i'm gonna go to off i'm gonna hit apply um by the way these corrections here that was very quick i mean i could spend all day in in the negative lab settings but i'm not gonna bore you with that so i do have some marks here that are dust marks that i gotta get rid of but i've noticed recently that uh removing dust marks and adding sharpness is a lot better down in photoshop so i'm going to go up to photo edit in right here and then just edit in photoshop edit a copy with lightroom adjustments it's going to carry the lighting adjustments let's hit edit going to pull it up i'm gonna full screen it all right here we go so now we're in here so for starters go to filter sharpen and then we'll do smart sharpen and this is pretty immediate you can if i zoom in you should be able to see it just look at the top right here there's off [Music] and on and something like these trees over here you might be able to really notice it i'm not one to fiddle with sharpening settings a lot so right now i'm just going to leave it on um and as simple as just going over here to this spot removal tool right here zooming right in get your size about roughly where it should be and you can just go right through the negative and remove simple as that this is usually the part that people hate the most and you can just start having a grand old time removing dust off a negative um i definitely recommend listening to a podcast or your favorite album while you scan your film and remove dust all day long i mean again you can be a scientist and use a duster and be very very precise with removing dice before it even gets on the scanner but sometimes let's be honest we're not feeling it so when this is done oh saw one more right there this is looking pretty good i dig it let's say let's say we're done we're feeling good about this image and now we want to shoot it to instagram well let's do that go over to export uh i'm gonna do the good old jpeg on this one i got it right here i got a jpeg quality 100 export and i'm gonna shoot it to right where i just had it i'm gonna go youtube video friend kona i got lrc tiffs and insta i'm not ready for the insta one yet so i'm gonna go type one in i'm gonna do jpegs i'm gonna save it and it's gonna shoot out all right um i could make the the insta file um in here but i'm gonna make it in another software that i've actually started to really like which i want to show you guys which is this this is figma it's a free design software and it is a freaking joy to use so i'm going to go over down here i'm going to go to instagram which i've already started on my catalogs here i mean if you're going on anyone's instagram nowadays especially photographers you'll notice that we tend not to just use a full screen image we tend to just do like the white ram where you have more possibilities for framing and aspect ratios and stuff like that because sometimes you shoot a 35 frame and like you you want it in a four by five size or you want it in a panorama size and you want to crop in and outer um when you're stuck to just the instagram size you cannot really play with that as much pretty much everything has to get zoomed up to size which in my opinion just drives me crazy so i'm gonna do a new file right here up top i'm gonna do nh franconia mount um right here you can click this frame icon up top and right here they have it for you easy um if you were going to do this in photoshop it's just a little more annoying because you got to go into photoshop and plug in the exact numbers and everything or save a preset um to me it's just easy to come in here and just do 10 20 30 images like let's say i i scanned three or four rolls that day and i'm happy with a bunch of images and i i want to go post them on instagram eventually i'm going to drag them all in here i'm going to make a bunch of them so right here i'm going to go to instagram post which is a 1080 by 1080 down here i'm just going to make the background darker because i want to actually see the frames um and i can just go over to file explorer i'm gonna drag it in in a second [Music] it's right here i'm gonna pull it in and i really like this because if i zoom out uh it's control and mouse out by the way and i zoom out on figma if i get this photo out of here right and i put it right there that's my tiff file it is 4096 by 2746 this is instagram 1080 by 1080. this is the i don't want to get on a rant but this this right here is is is why photographers like myself don't really like instagram because as a delivery format it's like we're we're just limiting ourselves like this is a 35 millimeter frame i can get this printed probably up to like 11 by 14 8 by 10 print someone can stand next to it and just see it for what it is but i now have to downsize it so shift click and drag oh do that again all right i'm gonna zoom in on this uh let me get it like about to edge all right over here just easy align it up you don't need to master uh you don't need to mess around with rasterizing layers and with all that in photoshop i mean this is just as simple as dragging in the photo aligning it immediately and we're good to go so right over here i'm going to go to rectangle i'm just going to drag this in and it just auto locks onto it easy enough it is gray i want it black of course and now it is at the exact size of the image so i've like i said i went from a 4000 horizontal image to a 1030 image so we're already a fourth of the quality uh so i do a five point frame five point black frame on my images so see it's about 10 30. so i'm going to do 1035 of course and then good old math over here we got a 691 so it's 696. um now just simple enough align and align go over here to the layers drag it under hold on a second [Music] that does not look about right let me try that again oh look at that i didn't get it right so it's 696 right now so i need to go to 701 oh i need to completely do this over again wow what a depressing display so i'm gonna go to about here line it up again [Music] 10 35 six ninety six that should be it send it make it black [Music] i'm seeing a large black line here i think i might have uh had a mess up guys that's weird it says it's not appearing on the photoshop file oh that is very strange is this not allowed well accidents happen i guess but as simple as that i don't know what's happening here i can't tell you at the moment but you would have it here and you could do you could just duplicate a bunch of these and drag in all your images put black spaces behind them and you can have a whole row so as you'll see here i have here's a bunch of instagram images uh they're all good to go it's my buddy tom and they all have five point black frames on and as simple as this all i have to do is shift click all these frames go down to here export i can do jpeg and then export 900 jpegs immediately that's to me this is a lot faster and a lot more intuitive and snappier than using this many art boards in let's say photoshop or illustrator because then it's the computer starts to chug along because it's rendering things in full um figma is more of like a design brainstorming tool so you can drag stuff in really quickly if you look up here all the tools are very rudimentary but i mean we're making white instagram files with backgrounds so it's really simple we just drag in the image put it on and on my instagram i haven't noticed any any resolution drops or anything it looks pretty much exactly the same and it's about the exact same file size as when i used to do this in photoshop but to me i i'm just craving um ways to make my scanning film process just so much faster and just a breeze i mean it i i love film don't get me wrong but if you spend a lot of time uh scanning negatives or you you just spend a lot of time not shooting especially digital when you're just editing photos all the time it uh it starts to get you after a while and it it's it's it's just personally i don't think photography is all about being at this computer screen i think it's we have to be out there and experience things and try to try to be shooting most of the time and not editing all the time because i mean we can get better we can get technically better at editing and but at the end of the day it's we're at a screen and it becomes extremely exhausting and it's it's really not what it's all about and you don't want to get to that point where uh for your look it requires you to put in hours and hours on the screen i mean as long as i can get a good look or something i'm really happy with in camera on film and then i get the skin back and like that it's just a pop of color and i'm really happy with it that's that's what i'm looking for i'm not looking for um i'm not looking for being a computer wizard so to speak so that right there was silver fast to negative lab to instagram but i can backtrack and i want to show you um the silverfast method which actually uh cuts in half what we just did for um for the negative lamp and actually i think it's actually quicker but it has its downsides and its upsides so let's go back to silver fast i'm gonna go over here i'm gonna zoom out i'm gonna delete this frame and then now i gotta go to a negative right here so i have a negative it's 48 bit by 24 bit we're gonna do a pre-scan again just in case we're gonna give it a minute ah the wonder of waiting for scans so for silverfest to recognize the frame we do something similar so we want to go right inside of the frame right here right about there is nice i'm going to do a zoom again [Music] so once the zoom in scan happens uh you now want to pull it to the outer edges of the frame um but now we go down to here um by the way we got to make sure that this is all the same again because it tends to reset every time you do a new scan so 20 20 francona we'll go to youtube video we're going to go to the tiffs and we're going to put it in there and this is going to be the image silver fast [Music] alright so 3200 we're going on the tiff file folder um leave this alone for now but go down to here so get rid of the masking again uh we have negafix so this is this is the really great part about silver fast so if you want to skip negative lab pro you don't want to let's say you don't want to fork over the hundred dollars and you got your hands on silver fast for free let's say you have like an epson v600 or v550 something like that i'm pretty sure the license is probably like 80 bucks something like that go over to here pick your film stock or your film cup brand and then now here's your film stocks so this was superior and then i shut down 400. and right away it's starting to shift right in but now right here we have the tolerance level you can adjust this as you can see if you go all the way down you'll see it just completely blows out it kind of affects the highlights it's kind of just like blasting in color i i think something past 50 from 50 on to 100 is usually the good spots it depends on the image i mean literally just shift it and get a hang for it you turn the stat up and get a really crazy look with this one um contrast controls are right here mid-tones stuff like that your histogram is down here you can do this right here which might work the color cast removal um let me see that didn't really work i'm gonna try the auto color color cast removal right here yeah it's just about the same so something like this this image is like very strong with the purple hues coming in somehow um so i actually would have to clean this up elsewhere unless i can control it right here with the global cc so if you click here you're affecting the whole image and obviously i'm in magenta right now like just look at this guy i can just tap green and just bring in some green on this image right about there is not bad i can go to the shadows and make the shadows a little blue or make them a little warmer yeah we'll go to highlights make them nice and bright yellowish so this is where i start to get annoyed with silverfest because these controls are nice at the outset they look like they're nice but when you have an image that comes in with a strong cast like this um you can fiddle with it for a while but the more you pull away color and the more you shift things around you start to get some very serious diminishing returns um and you might be able to tell from the screen right now that this image is kind of more like neutral than what we have here which was this was the negative web pro this kind of has like a more natural pop to it like this the are already blue the trees are already coming in green right in the ottoman blue and stuff like that and you saw me i mean it was minimal adjustments in uh in lightroom so i'll go back over to silver fast right here [Music] um but this is the cool part so i can go to the isrd right here get a dust and scratch removal i'm gonna put that on because this is actually a converted negative that's gonna scan so the software actually works well going in here removing all this little spots right here um i just want to make sure i don't have the sharpening on i mean i can just adjust this just a tad before i get rid of it but you pump up the exposure a bit but i'm just gonna scan this i'm gonna go with this right now i'm gonna hit scan and it's gonna scan the whole image it's gonna do the dust removal and just like that i mean i already have a converted negative that i'm scanning out i mean i do have a color con a color cast going on i mean i can now bring this into photoshop try to remove the cast um but just for time's sake i'm gonna bring it into photoshop i'm gonna throw that sharpening on it and we can just look at them side by side um what i've noticed over i mean i've scanned a lot of rules recently for a project coming up and i've noticed the cheaper film stocks um they tend to not play so well with um the negafix within silverfast because i think i don't know i think the profiles aren't as finely tuned because i'll put something in like portrait 400 and it's like damn it just works immediately what i've noticed scanning with silverfest is that the the cheaper film stock like like this the fuji superior 400 i mean i literally bought this at a cvs before we hiked this mountain uh it doesn't play as well with with uh silverfest but the cheaper film stocks uh tend to play a lot better with uh negative lab pro i mean to be fair you could probably get the exact same results with either method but uh most of us won't admit but we again we don't want to spend hours on end adjusting color contrast and color casts on our images we just want to have a system that works nice and quick so it's it's it's a decision you have to make it's it probably depends on the role uh that's the point i'm at right now where i think i prefer the negative lab automatic pop that it gives you but then also there may be some roles i shoot in the future that i want this like naturalistic um tone that i kind of get out of a silver fast and silver fast kind of makes a lot easier like the scan just finished and then now this this image i'm gonna pull it up right now it's like i said look if you look side by side now let me back that out of the way for a second right there we have dust there dust there dust there that's there if you look at the negative it's not here at all where is it i don't see it it's pretty amazing so i'm going to go over where this file is right now give it a photo 2020 francona youtube video it's in tiffs it's right next to the next here we go we can just open this up into photoshop go over to filter sharpen smart sharpen bam i mean you can fiddle with smart shopping settings but for now it's working pretty well but to me that's that's pretty rock solid i mean to me that's like done i mean the cast on the sky actually works for this image but again that was one scan from silverfest and that's probably like minutes or about half the time it would take me to do the negative lab pro method just because i have to go to lightroom and i have to go over between two to three softwares with this it's pretty much silver fast and then to photoshop for sharpening i mean again you can use the unsharp masking in silver fast but uh i've i've noticed some some mess ups with it sometimes it leaves lines on the image because it can read it all the way but if we just look at these now side by side uh you can now see what i'm talking about this is this the negative lab pro scan which is a massive pop and then this is the silver fast scan where it's more of like a natural kind of kind of full color range look so it really depends on what you're looking for i mean i assume you can get this look for negative five pro but i haven't really tested it yet but again it's just like anything in image making where there's always like a starting place they have to come from and that's why people tend to prefer a certain camera a certain software a certain method because a lot of times people prefer the starting place or they prefer the feeling of the process so like for me i i think it's a lot more fun to use negative lab pro but then also silver fast um maybe a little more into intuitive for like color control and like that but it's really a toss-up so i mean uh i don't know i hope you got something out of this video i mean i hope these two methods you now can see which one you kind of would want to prefer i would recommend to probably move away from epson scan view scans not so bad i was using that recently but but so far silverfast for me silver fast gets the best positive scans for negative lab pro um epson scan they've kind of like they just don't really support it as well anymore like i'm running on windows right now and epson scan just completely doesn't recognize my scanner which is funny because i'm using an epson um so i had to go over to viewscan and then eventually i found out i can get silverfast for free i just went try that out and then now here i'm at so i just think we get a there's a lot of us online shooting film for instagram and stuff like that and sure it's trendy and all that but at the end of the day we're shooting photography we should have our own voice over our images and i think the process that gives you the most control is probably the best or the process that gives you your preferred starting point so do you prefer to start from a naturalistic look like this or do you prefer to start from more of like an automatic pop like a bam film image so like something like this people would just scan it like this and then they would just automatically upload the film they wouldn't even go in here and adjust things but yeah so silverfast negativelab pro i'm gonna be that guy and i can't give you an answer on it but that's basically the two ways to get to where you need to get to um as you saw you have a lot of control on the scanning software and then of course you can control these images in lightroom or photoshop to basically the end of time so so yeah hope you like this video and i'll see you next one guys you

Channel: Ben Sharples

Views: 12,700

Keywords: film photography, film, photography, 35mm, scanning film, how to scan film, scan film, silverfast 8, negative lab pro, epson scanner, 35mm film, fuji superia 400, fujifilm, silverfast, learning film photography

Id: VyHc3uac4-Q

Length: 37min 26sec (2246 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Nikon-FE]

Nice video, I just want to shime in on a specific point: you should be careful with the histogram tool in silverfast, you lost a ton of highlight details. A better way to do it is to drop the tolerance all the way down, keep the right part of the histogram to avoid clipping and correct each channel individually to correct for color cast and channel dependant clipping (the rgb squares on top of the histogram). Once you get the scan you can bring back the highlights up in ps/lr without clipping (dodge/burn if needed). There is also a "densiometer" tool that lets you check where and how big are the shadow/highlight clipping areas.

[u/Cost_Thin]

any reason you use TIFF over raw DNG's in silverfast if you're going to bring it into lightroom?

have a look at using some watched folders/auto import into lightroom too, makes one less step in the scanning workflow. the less you have to do the better.