How to Scan Black and White Film

welcome back to the channel and in today's video I'm going to be going through and showing you my current approach to scanning black-and-white film before we get into that I just want to do a quick channel update for those of you who are subscribed to my channel you'll be pleased to know that my new camera has arrived and please to let you know that it is a hustle blood 503cw I'm very excited to receive this camera is a beautiful camera I just want to say thank you once again to dial Carey for helping me make this choice and if you would like to see his review of this camera I will leave a link for you to check that out so I only received this a couple of weeks ago I haven't used it yet it came with an 80 millimeter lens and 150 millimeter lens and I have a 50 millimeter lens on the way and a 90 degree view finder my back operation is next week on Wednesday very excited to hit that out of the way I've been suffering for quite some time with that it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be able to get out shooting straight away there's going to be a few weeks of recovery so I'm kind of looking at maybe three to four weeks and I might be able to get out there with this new camera and do some vlogging so I'm quite excited about that I just wanted the opportunity to update you on a couple of videos I've got coming out in the future the first one is scanning color negative film the second one is scanning with a DSLR instead of a flatbed scanner and the third one is what's in my bag once the rest of my equipment arrives I'm going to do an overview of what's in my camera bag from a film landscape photography perspective so if you quite keen to see any of those videos I encourage you to subscribe to my channel and you'll be notified when they are released so scanning back and white film if you want to scan some black and white film or any other film you're gonna need some equipment the first thing you're gonna need is a scanner a Maya scanner of choice is an Epson via under flatbed scanner you're going to need some software to run on your computer and my software of choice is silver fast and that runs great on my iMac you're also gonna need some accessories and accessories that I use are a rocket blower and then I have some tweeters for handling the film and they also have some conga love some fine cotton gloves that you can buy from your art store you can also buy these from an art store I'll leave a link to where you can buy this rocket blower in the description down below and I'll also leave links in the description down below for where you can look at the scanner and the software so I already have my film loaded into my film holder and it's already in the scanner ready to go it's hild for delta 100 I have 2 6 by 7 negatives from my previously on the mir 7 when I was loading the film into the film holder I took extra special care with my rocket blower to make sure that I removed as much visible dust as possible from the negative itself both sides the film holder both sides and also the glass on the flatbed scanner so make sure that I had installed a film correctly in the holder I always make sure I can read the writing and then that just lets me know that I install correctly and the films in there ready to go so now let's get into my computer and start scanning some plaque on my film so here we have silver fast AI Studio and if you haven't used some of us before then what happens when you open it up every time it remembers the previous settings from your last scam just so happens that I conveniently scan black and white film during my last scanning session well let's say for example you weren't scanning back on my film and he was cunning color film or sly film when you need to change the settings of the interface so that you're able to scan like in my film and where you do that is up at the top here there's an option to choose positive or negative and you can choose the bit depth obviously I've set my um on negative and the VIP depth is 16-bit for black and white and that pauses in the right settings to start scanning back on my films so once we have the software set up to scumbucket might film we can go ahead and do a priest cam now the scanner took a few minutes to do this so I'll fast forward this ocean so the scanners finished during its pre scan the next thing we do is orient the images to how it would expect to see them so as you can see there are two images and there are two outlines that when we use these to define the boundaries of the scan so we'll go ahead and adjust these to suit the 6x7 format it's pretty simple to do you just drag them and then move them and it's quite important that you don't include any of the edge of the frame and either black and don't worry too much because you can refine this further in a second that'll do so as you can see on the left here as I click on each box it changes slightly so you're able to make changes for one side and then move over to the other side and the sames are completely different so I think for the purpose of this video we'll try and scan this one so it's on the Spree scan the next thing we do is click on the zoom in and the scanner will go ahead and do a more detailed scan and this will take some time so I'll fast forward this section again so now this kind of finished the more details can we can go ahead and refine the boundaries of the image again further to be more accurate so at this point I will just edge them out and I will make sure that I'm not encroaching on the black film if you need to adjust for angle you can do that by grabbing this point here and rotating it so I think that looks pretty good just going to rotate it a little bit that looks good so now we can go ahead and start setting up the software to do a full scan so the first thing we have here is the scan dimensions and the first thing we do is put in the film name and we want to save it in TIFF format so the objective here is to set it up so that I can export it and then upload into a library of a Photoshop and TIFF format is the best format to do that you can decide where you want to save it I'm going to save mine on my desktop we've already set the boundaries of the frame is it the format so it's custom because we've dragged it into position so 300 pixels per inch is the recommended quality I wouldn't go any higher than that you could probably scan it less quality I guess it really comes down to what you're going to do with the image and in terms of the pixel per inch output I wouldn't go any higher than 2400 and as you can see already the saying the file size is going to be nearly 69 megabits so that's now set up correctly for how I like it and then we'll move down through the settings and here we have the density meter and the only thing I change here is the bit depth I change that to 16-bit just to make sure we get a good grayscale when we're doing the scan so the next thing we have is negative x this is one of the strengths of using silver fast particularly for black and white and color negative film so if a story has a number of different manufacturers and film types at different speeds loaded into the software and once you've scanned your film into the software you're able to go in and apply a setting that's suitable to that film only just adjust the colors so we'll go ahead and find ours for this one when it's Delta 100 that's it and as you can see the image is changed slightly this is to remove color cast not really relevant for black and white film and here you can adjust the exposure and tolerances if you wish to I would probably come back to these later so there's some more things we can adjust and as you can see at the top here we have a histogram so we're going to add that at this point now I would set my Black Point on white point and we do that by dragging these sliders here across just to the edge of the histogram and the white is already set we'll just bring that down slightly like that and then we can adjust the mid-tone so this is really now preference so how you set this I just slide it around a little bit and just see how I like it at different strengths I tend to quite like you know really contrast he looks I'll move it in this instance to more of a darker mid-tone just to get a bit more contrast roundabout there looks good okay so the next thing we're going to do is have a couple of features that are going to help with the sharpness of the image and also help remove some scratch and dust the potential to be in there so as you can see here there's a toolbar and in here we can find an unsharp mask this helps with sharpening so we'll go ahead and click on it to add that and when it comes to scratch and dust removal there are two things that we can use now the first one in here is rd uses an infrared sensor and you can only use this on call the negative and slide film unfortunately black and white film the composite within the film actually blocks the infrared light so silver fast came with another approach which basically evaluates the image and detects artifacts in the image so we'll click on s RDX so before we start adjust in these settings it's good just to have a look around the image and we can see that there's some slight visible grain and there's also some white artifacts that we can see in the sky and also in the scene so with the sharpening mask I have mine set to 220 typically and the radius to 2.0 and because we can see some grain in here I'm going to bring the threshold up to 10 and that's just going to help stop sharpening some of the grain so now we can move on to the dust and scratch removal tool because of the way that this tool works it requires a bit more manual labor to get it to work how you want it to do the infrared ones much easier it just scans and it just removes artifacts with this one it can try and remove artifacts that you don't want removing for example as you can see in the middle here we've got this rock it could quite easily detect things in here which would then spend quite a lot of time trying to adjust this feature and wouldn't actually achieve what we want to achieve would just be wasting time so what we have the ability to do here is add some masks so basically what we can do we can define an area within the image that we want to apply scratch and removal tool so we go ahead and click on this pen and we're able to draw an area around here so we can apply the scratch and dust removal so I'm going to go ahead and do that now you basically just click click on the image and then you just click wherever you want it to snap to and you just go around and do this throughout the image so I'm going to do this right around the image so I'll fast forward this section because it would probably take a few minutes so once we've gone around the rock so we go around the edges just did you find the edges and then we come back to the first one click on that and it'll ask us to name the mask so we'll do that and there we go we have our mask so now we're going to go ahead and do a preview and we do that by click on this button here and the scanner will do a scan and it'll take some time so fast forward shn again okay so the scan is finished in its pre scan and as you can see the image is looking a lot sharper I just want to mention quickly that this mask doesn't affect the sharpening tool this is purely for the scratch removal tool so now we need to adjust the distance scratch removal two or more so at this point I will move this to an area where there is visible dust like this point here as you can see this on white artifacts but we can see so when they go to the distant scratch removal tool we click right artifacts which I already have selected and then when we click on the mode we want to highlight the artifacts in the image and when we highlight them there will be red the next thing we do is take a mental note or the actual size of these artifacts they're not big and they're not small either so I will move that up kind of like to Midway and then because they're quite small you've there's quite detection that's going to be required so I'll bring that up quite a bit as well it's that's pretty close you'll notice that every time you were just these sayings the preview regenerates and depending on the speed of your computer that'll take some time so as you can see here there's a few other little artifacts that it's not picking up but it's picked up some of these bigger ones so I'm going to increase the detection a little bit to say 14 and hopefully I'll pick up these other artifacts and that's picked those up blue as you can see from these red dots there's a few little speckles around the edge that's not the end of the world if it was worse then we'd play around with the settings even more when they go to the correct mode here so this will apply how the image will look when it's finally scanned so we can go ahead and preview that as soon as you can see it's removed those dust marks and it doesn't actually look that bad but it looks good so we'll just move it back to mark and then we'll move the preview around the image and just look at some other areas just to make sure that we've picked everything up as we move it reloads it's quite annoying it's a bit slow you know my machine has got I think 32 gigabyte of RAM and it still sits quite a bit of time to do this so you can see here there's just a few of the little one so I'm just going to increase the detection a little bit it's got to 15 doesn't take much see that's too much what if I reduce the tile size mmm I don't think so so we'll move the tile size back and then we'll reduce the detection down to 14 you look I think that looks better to be honest if some of these were bugging me I will probably just address them in Lightroom at least silver fast has taken care of most of it we'll just keep going around the image just to see all it's been doing yep so it's picked up those yep yep see there's a couple little ones here that I would just do that in Lightroom and then we go over there we up to a rock and just just to make sure that it's not making anything up there yeah and as you can see that mask is doing its job so in terms of scanning with silver faster this is as far as I would take it to come out of the preview mode first up and there and that returned you to the full view mode it doesn't give you the preview anymore so you will still see these white blobs around these white artifacts but when you scan it they will be removed so I've finished now here in silver fast so I'm going to go ahead and press scan this will take some times or fast-forward this section where the scanner does its thing and the silver fuss is finished and on our desktop we should have the image and here it is we can preview that and as you can see all those white artifacts have gone it's looking very sharp there's a few little specks down here overall it's looking pretty good there's one there these are easily manageable in Lightroom so what we have is an exported TIFF file that's about 60 megabytes and now I would store this wherever I store my images and then upload it into Lightroom or Photoshop for further processing so that's a brief overview of my approach to scanning black and white film I went on to upload it into Lightroom made a couple of changes just cropped it a little bit and just it contrasts a little bit and then exported it and I'll put it up on the screen now to show you [Music] so hope you enjoyed that image as much as I do you know Alpha Delta 100 is a fantastic film stock and taking on the Mamiya 7 which is a fantastic camera and so our fastest from fantastic job of the scanning so we're heading towards the end of this video today but before we finish up I just want to quickly say a big thank you to one of my subscribers in Germany for requesting this video I hope it has helped you with scanning black and white film and yeah please subscribe to my channel and check out my Facebook page and Instagram page if you want to see some more of my content or be notified when I upload a video so that's it for today's video thank you for tuning in and I hope to see you next time bye for now

Channel: Stephen Milner

Views: 6,196

Keywords: Black and White Film Scanning, epson v550, ilford hp5, medium format film, film photography, medium format landscape photography, black and white, 120 film, silverfast 8 scanning negatives, silverfast 8 tutorial, silverfast ai studio 8 tutorial, ilford delta 100 120, epson v800 silverfast, epson v800 scanner, epson v800 scanning negatives, film scanning, large format tile, medium format film landscape photography, ilford hp5 plus 400

Id: TjZMPixQYwc

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020