How to Scan Colour Film (Ft. Silverfast 8.8)

in today's video I'm going to be showing you how to get the best results out of your color negative films when scanning at home now normally enjoy scanning but if you can get a good scan at home you're going to save loads of money on lab fees and it's really not that bad once you get into it what I'm going to do is I'm gonna walk you through my process I'm gonna be using an Epson flatbeds and silver foil software I have been sponsored by silver first to make this video but I'm not going to be biased it is great I've been using it for a couple years and and yeah I'm going to show you some of the results you can get out of it if your pictures are currently looking a bit like this then hopefully by the end of this video you'll have them looking like this what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk you through different options within the software I'm not going to show you the process of loading a scanner because it can be more important than you think and by the end you you should be better you should find it a little bit easier and most importantly you're not going to have to spend quite so much time sitting at your computer stressing about it I've got some Porcher here I've actually got a load of different sizes but I think I'm gonna scan one of the media more formats I know that porch was a very popular film and it's particularly popular for its color so a big aim in this video is to help you guys get the the color rendition you want after all if you can't get your film scans to have that beautiful film it kind of past the look then what's the point of shooting film let's jump into me loading the scanner and yeah follow on from there and hopefully I'll teach you something about scanning okay now I'm going to show you how to load some film into the scanner now we've got two main objectives here we're going to try and keep the film as dust free as possible and also as flat as possible in the holder so get the correct focus first things first I've got my cotton gloves on these are absolutely great they're absolutely mandatory with these I can pick up and manipulate the film whereas without them I'd get fingerprints oil scratches all kinds of bad stuff on the negatives so I'm gonna get my film holder out this is just a plastic frame designed to hold the film at the correct height above the the scanning sensor pop this open and let's have a look I think I'm gonna scan this piece of medium format film so these are a couple of six five four five portraits now looking at the film if you read the text along the rebei left to right as it should be read that means you're looking at the front of the front and the film actually goes backwards into the holder so what I'm going to do is turn it upside down so I'm going to keep the bottom of the film and just use this rocket blur to clean off as much as much dust as I can now you never get all of it but the more you get the less you have to deal with in the software so it's good to give it a thorough clean what that looks good it's very important to hold it upside down so that no dust is settling on the on the side of it now that that's clean I'm going to have one last pass over the perspex give that a blast for the rocket blur as well and I can place this down when you're lining it up in the tray you want to make sure that parts of the film are on the raised sections on either side now the reason for that is when you close the trap and click it down it actually pinches the film it and presses it against the plastic now that looks good to me you'll notice that last time I didn't actually clean the top of it so I'll do that now I think I'm only going to scan this left frame so I'm going to pay extra attention to getting that as clean as possible right and now as soon as that's clean again the kids are the constant dust problem I'm going to turn that upside down okay just gonna have a quick look at my flatbed make sure that's clean as well once you're happy with everything all you got to do is line up your tray close the lid and that's ready to scan [Music] okay let's see what we haven't silver fast here we go takes a second to boot up right then first things first we're just going to go up here and select the correct medium now this is a transparency and it is also negative and in my color options I have various outputs I mean I could have greyscale I can have the raw which doesn't actually apply any of the settings if I wanted to do a lot of post-processing afterwards I could use 48 bit but because I'm going to do it all within so fast I'm going to go to the 48 to 24 bit probably a best option if you're scanning color and next up I'm going to hit pre scan and what that's going to do is a very quick low resolution overview of everything that's loaded now you can see these pictures of Hampstead Heath and not what I just loaded and that's because it actually keeps a preview of the last thing that it's saw this won't take a second well that's actually doing it's doing its thing what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up here and I'm going to rename this file to YouTube and I'm going to set my output to my desktop okay so now I've got some slightly washed out looking scans the reason for that is that I haven't set my frame correctly so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by resetting it and then I'm gonna put this red box as accurate as I can over this left frame okay good way to do this is to be a little bit inaccurate at the start and then to click this magnifying glass here and what that will let me do is zoom in and get a a much more precise look at what's in the scanner as you can see I'm being fairly careful but it's not too big a deal if I do crop into the image somewhat it might actually be the case that I crop this well into the image because there's quite a lot of empty space on this side of the frame but for now I'm gonna leave it like that right then now that we've set the scan frame I'm able to get an accurate look at my output size when I change the resolution slider now this is quite a contentious issue and people say that some flatbeds can't really go above 2400 I'm gonna risk it I'm gonna go for 3200 and really try and get as much detail out of this image as I can and as you can see that gives me a seven thousand by five thousand pixel result so it's around 35 40 megapixels and and definitely enough detail for printing up to a three right that's all good let's close can dimensions and I guess let's go down in order no let's not go in order because the next most important tool and this is a phenomenally important tool is the negev it's now a huge amount of work has gone into this tool apparently they have a different film profile every single scanner they make software for so if you have an Epson v700 you have a different profile for your film then at a plus tech or a reflector or whatever you buy i've shot this on kodak ports for hundreds so i'm going to go down to my portrait and I'm gonna look at my portrait options actually this is portrait 160 because I'm using a studio light so I wouldn't have used the high-speed stuff that looks good also within this tool is this exposure bar now this isn't actually increasing the exposure time or kind of widening your aperture increasing your ISO it's not a true increase in exposure what it is is just the software globally adjusting the brightness now I actually I meted this with a flash meter so I'm pretty happy leaving it at zero but if you have underexposed your image obviously you can bump it up and you'll see that it does bring out a bit of the shadows up here and and likewise you can try and recover a little bit of detailing your highlights if you you do overshoot now let's put this to zero that looks pretty good I'm going to I'm going to quickly turn off this preset so you can see quite how much of a difference it makes so this is the porch 160 preset and this is no preset you see how the colors I mean there's a certain orange cars to this image now let's go back into portrait and it does make a huge difference that was 116 ok I'm going to close mega fix and for next tool I'm gonna look at is the set of tools that help you with your exposure now I've shown you the straight up positive negative 3 stop exposure slider but apart from that you can also use tools to help you set your black point the white point and also your mid-tones now the easiest way to start with that is the histogram tool in this tool you can adjust your black point which is how much of the image is registered as black your white point and by bringing this in you obviously register more of the images white and your mid-tone which really acts similarly to exposure and it's it's adjusting the kind of the gradation how much of the image falls is a highlight and how much is a shadow as you can see I'm actually writing the image up a little bit I do like the shadows but I just quite like the affects that a bit more light has on the skin you can see I've given that a value of plus 15 that's reflected here and actually buy for my gradation tool which is the next one we look at it's reflected in here as well when you're using the histogram you can change it to look at your different color channels obviously this is 24-bit RGB or you can overlay them like this if you use Lightroom you might be more used to this kind of thing but but I'm happy with additive the gradation or curves as Adobe call it is a pretty simple tool I'm gonna add a little bit of contrast to my image and I'm gonna do that by gently sliding up and as you can see it gives it that classic there shape that's a little bit too much because I'm losing detail in the hair so maybe maybe fours enough I was using a beauty dish so it's gonna be quite contrasting anyway because you've got this fall off on the backdrop that's fine I don't need to do too much in the software because I did it when I took the photo it's obviously people say is better okay if there's other areas of the image that you'd like to draw a detail out of say that you really under expose to your image and you just want to get a tiny bit more out of the shadows a good tool to use would be the multiple exposure tool what this does is to separate scans one of which is done a much higher exposure than the other and it then blends them together and gives you a kind of in the scanner HDR of your shot it's useful in certain cases but for a correctly exposure moves like this I'm not going to use it likewise this tool here adaptive Auto contrast optimization what it does is it tries to bring a little bit of detail out of the darker areas in fact what I'll do now is I'll go down here and I'll turn it on and off and if you watch areas like here the the shadow here goes from very dark to black I prefer black but the the very dark mean that I guess there's a bit more detail again situational I don't need it and for that reason I don't yet and that kind of closed it down completely now you might be thinking that this image here looks pretty good to go already but there are a few more tools that I'd like to show you before I get on to color let's close these down because you can get a little bit clustered obviously you can do this in Photoshop or whatever but I like to do it in the scanning software and I'll show you why I'm talking about sharpening I can open up my sharpening tool and I'm going to use this option here which is the high quality preview what this does is a full one to one preview of the entire frame and by doing this I'm able to see exactly how the scan will render with the adjustments I've already given it so far I'm just using auto sharpness and that is a great default I'll be honest 90% of the time I use auto sharpness the only reason I adjust is if I think a landscape landscape image can take a little bit more sharpening or if it's over sharpened it's over sharpening is something that's very important to avoid with any kind of photography but when you get the haloing or the kind of the crispy effect on edge edge borders um you can detract from the image so I'm always cognizant of that I've got a radius of two point three that is quite big so maybe I can turn him down a little bit before the air the scan takes effects and power at 260 it's high but I've seen it higher so I'm gonna let this happen this will take a couple of minutes so I'll skip forward until it's done great so the the preview scan is complete and as you can see it's kind of just snapped into HD I can use this yellow rectangle in the Navigator tool to pan around the image so let's check for some critical focus looks pretty good I mean I'm seeing the definition and the the eyelashes so that's pretty good so there's a bit of dust that's on the negative so you have to remember as hard as you try to keep it clean you're never gonna get it a hundred percent apart from that I think this looks pretty good I'm mainly looking at this point in terms of sharpening I'm wondering what happens if I add a little bit more radius maybe a little bit more power as well because it's applying it to the the scan that sort of held as a preview it will have to reprocess the filter so give it a second as with most things scanning it is going to take a while but it is worth it because doing it like this I have a complete real-time look at how it will come out before I actually click the Scan button and obviously with a flatbed it is good to to get as much sharpness as possible steady a struggle sometimes so here we go that looks good to me and importantly I can't see any evidence of over sharpening so I'm pretty happy with that that's let's have a look at some of the other areas of focus I think it's mainly on the eyes which is obviously great for a portrait so yeah it seems like this is the sharpest area around here that looks good to me now that we've got it nice and sharp the next important thing to do is to use the ISR Dietl to take the dust and scratches another nonsense out of the image you see up here by the side there's a is these little flecks of dust and although I did my best to clean it I missed a few that's fine because this tool here is Rd can get the rest for me what this does is it applies a second pass of the scanner with an infrared detection channel and what it will do is it will pass that infrared light through the scanner and it's actually able to detect dust and defects on the negative now it will take a couple of minutes but when this is done what the software will do is attempt to mask it for me essentially it's like the clone tool and Photoshop it's just silver fire saying I think this is dust and I'm going to put something over it that's of a similar color of its surroundings once this is doing its scan what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a look around and see if I can find a really obvious piece of dust and I'll show you a before and after so you can see quite how well the software's done there we go I think that was one of her hands okay can you see here this circle of I don't know if that's dust or a scratch to be honest it at this point also be a development error but but I think the software will be able to find it now it does best with dust and it's fairly good of scratches but if you have problems with development it can sometimes get a bit confused essentially it has to treat infrared differently to normal film to to actually have an effect but um but I think it should be able to do that manually spotting this using Photoshop or other editing software would take hours so put your faith in is Adi does take a while but it can really really save you time I mean it saved me hundreds of hours already I'm sure of it so you can save it as dust then here as well okay and now that it's done you see an incredible reduction of dust let's get back up to the hand and I think that's the difficult one and as you can see because it's a development defect it has just one a little circle around it okay there was also some dust up here by the left eye let's have a look okay and as you can see it's it's caught all the stuff I missed that's great okay so I've got a sharp scan I've got a dust free scan what I'm going to do is I'm going to close these two dialogues actually I'm going here and I'm gonna click on HQ and just come back out of that into one two one okay I have actually lost the preview with the dust reduction but that's okay because having done the one to one I know that it works so what I've done now is come back to the full image and that's all I can focus on adjusting the color and that's really the last step so the two major tools in silver files for color a global CC and selective CC selective CC as the name suggests only affects particular color channels I'm not going to use that in this particular image but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on it and just show you how it works so that if the image that you're scanning requires it you know how it works now this wheel sort of shows you what color channel you're affecting to pick a new one because as it's set to read the or anything affecting this image what I can do is just click any area of the image and it will choose the color that corresponds to it now this image is really gray skin tone and a bit of gold in the hair so what I'll do is I'll pick up some gold or yellow over here and I'll just show you what happens if I play around with it this is just hue saturation and luminance the three classic color adjustment tools you can adjust my Q I can sort of bring it into orange although I'm not sure that they'd appreciate that portray obviously I can read it the other way it's very unhealthy let's put that back to zero yeah there we go now you can adjust the saturation as well actually you never subtler affect if you do this very gently but yeah even a even a minus ten is quite noticeable okay luminance just just as the sort of the brightness value so I can make it very reflective or kind of matte looking although because the hair tone and the skin color are similar in this instance I'm not sure this is a good idea I was just trying to give you a quick overview of what this does and it's sort of attacking my image now so what I'm going to do is use this tool here which is the activate tool is to kick this tool out of my sidebar and any tool that doesn't have a red dot under it is sort of turned off so you can see selected fend off until what I'm gonna use is global CC and this is an incredibly useful tool I think this is one of the best tools that they actually have in silver fast and I think it's better than color perfect so when I use this tool what I'm trying to do is identify color costs or add tints if say let's just give this image of blue color cast just to have a look at the result so you remember at the start when I showed you the kind of the bad scan so this is a very cool color and ition of the same image and what you've got to do is you've got to look at colors that you're familiar with for example skin tones or this is actually a neutral backdrop and you can diagnose the the color and then using this tool you drank the adopt away from the color that you're trying to move away from so the central point here is actually pretty neutral but if I had an image that was less neutral on my scanner had given it a strange cast maybe negative X had an ax we've done such a good job and it looked a little bit wrong for some reason what you can do is use this to to fix that problem now I remember at the start when I first turned on mega fix that was quite a magenta carp so all of those I'll turn this off so I can show you here we go so here's my magenta looking image and what I'll do with this tool just presetting it again is diagnose where I think the telecast is only think the color cost is somewhere around here so what I'm going to do is just move this dot completely away from it and as you can see what I've done by moving this dot into the green is actually in some way mimic Nega fix and actually kind of correct the image let's turn that back off and you can see what it looks like with a color cost so to treat a magenta color cost you're just dragging away from magenta I've actually gone a little bit too far it's kind of one scary green with this tool slice adjustments are really important because if you go anywhere near the edge you're going to get an abomination like this to render yeah obviously that's done a bit wrong another interesting thing is your ability to use the let me just turn negative on before talking about that so you can use specific areas of the tone curve when you're doing your adjustments place make a fix up here I have this three bar option which is means that it affects all of the image so when I move this to make the image a bit warmer what I'm doing is I'm making the shadows mid-tones and highlights warmer equally and that's great but sometimes you want to do it differently so with this what I could do is i could only affect kind of shadow areas so if you watch up here in the top left which is for the darkest part of the image what I can do is I can make that very blue sorry I'm in highlights let's reset this for a second so what if I wanted to make my shadows yeah I get over here so I can make the shadows or the darkest one makes sense blue it's a little bit of a cross process effect mid-tones is the most similar to the all tones slider there's not too much difference especially because even in this fairly contrast image most of the image is mid-tone highlights I can do a little tint to the skin so say I wanted to make her a little it more tend to drag down on the yellow stuff like that let's turn this off and see how much effect its had yeah I've really just changed the skin tone very slightly but it's really important to get your skin tones right especially with portrait a film that's renowned for having such good skin tones you really wanted to it correct in the camera I like the idea of having another tint in the shadows but I don't know if I don't want to mess up it too much mess it up too much I'll blow this mmm that's getting a bit wrong I'm not sure I like that I'm fit back in neutral okay this is probably the most important tool to get your scans looking as they should combining color correction with mega fix will get you 99% of the way there and the rest of it is really just filling in the gaps around the the image now I'm happy with this very slight adjustment I've made you can see that all I've done is just dragged it to make it slightly warmer maybe that's good what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to yeah I'm gonna go just quickly check YouTube desktop I have got this output file format option and I can put it as a JPEG obviously I would use a JPEG if it was for immediate web sharing but because it's more kind of archival I'll keep this as a as a save file before I post it or print it I'm going to click Tiff's and yeah time to click scan right scans done has finished what I'm going to do is close down that and here's my file now what I'm going to do is just open up Photoshop get rid of that spot on the hand so this doesn't shouldn't take a second let's get my Spot Healing Brush tool go to the hands and just click okay done last time here I'm actually gonna have a quick look at my image size I think this might be a little bit too big so I'm gonna make this four thousand pixels actually three thousand pixels to see I've taken it from hundred megabytes to nineteen it's always worth day okay lastly I've just noticed down in this bottom corner that's my miss a little bit of the frame what I could do is either crop in or be cheeky and just using a sport just Minh to do that than any game okay its name okay here's my finished image okay that just about wraps things up thanks for watching if you have any further questions then please that hesitate to leave a comment I'm pretty good at replying to those I've also made a another version of this video which is specifically about black and white film so if that's something you're interested in then check out this wink could help obviously the other stuff is quite similar there's a bit of overlap but I do think that there are some black and white specific tips apart from that yeah if you liked the video you can like you can subscribe all that good stuff and yeah thanks for watching

Channel: Jonathan Notley

Views: 75,426

Rating: 4.9094124 out of 5

Keywords: C41, Stand Dev, Scanning E6, BNW, scanner, epson, flatbed, v850, silverfast, colourperfect, kodak, portra, pakon, film scanner, vuescan, negative feedback

Id: Hbjvrjhr3-w

Length: 27min 27sec (1647 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 08 2018