Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Request for new feature:  I would like a negative to positive feature added that would be selected as a first step that would still allow all the other Qimage Ultimate features to work normally. 

Photography has been a passion of mine since I was in junior high school, including processing most of my own film.  Now that I have retired and joined the digital age I plan to digitize the thousands of negative that I have produced.  I have tried scanning some of my negatives with an Epson v600.  The results have been fair, but at one or so scans a minute I doubt I will live long enough to finish the project.  Dust also seems to be a big problem when using a flat bed scanner.

The answer seems to be to use my old darkroom to control dust and take a picture of my negatives with my Nikon D90 set to RAW, a close-up bellows, a prime135mm lens, a proper sized enlarger mask mounted to a diffuser box, a SB800 flash for a back-light.  With this arrangement I can copy a whole roll of negatives in just a few minutes.  The D90 produces a much sharper copy with better contrast than my scanner.

My photo editor of choice is PaintShop X6 and it has a negative to positive feature that works very well with both black & white or color images.  PaintShops problem is does not hand RAW files well.

I love Qimage Ultimate and the way it handles my normal RAW photos.  It is my hope that there is a way Qimage Ultimate will be able to help me with my negative digitizing project.

Thank You Charlie

An interesting project, Charlie.

As someone else facing the same challenge I thought I'd pass on this link.

http://tinyurl.com/q4v29wu

It does not answer your specific Qimage request but it might give you the odd pointer towards improving the method you have decided to adopt. Have fun. I admire your willingness to grab the challenge.

Tony

Charlie,
Would Something like this work fo you.... ?
This is already built into QU, and all it needs to do is to be turned on and off.

Color Neg and B&W neg
Does this help?

Fred

Fred
Where is this feature? I use my DSLR to copy negs shot on my collection of old 127 rollfilm cameras and use Photoshop to invert them, QI would be better for me.

Sample:  http://secalis.co.uk/P127/BHEE/BHEEpics.html (http://secalis.co.uk/P127/BHEE/BHEEpics.html)

Brian

I showed this a while back as a FUN challenge #13... but seriously,

The operation is simple. How you apply  it up to your work flow.

In the Editor, You can use LEVELS, and swap the upper and lower slider settings.
H goes from 255 to 0, and S goes from zero to 255.

Or you can use curves. Swap the diagonal from normal southwest to northeast, to northwest to southeast.

Now here's the part where you have to decide how to apply it.
It is  already a Predefined filter called "Negative.flt"
So you can apply it after you have tweaked the image, Right click on a thumb, or you can set it as a Global filter to be applied last.
You could apply is while in the editor by FILE, OPEN Filter Params.
The trick to remember is that applying the "Negative.flt" from the Editor, using FILE.... OPEN..., will remove all other filters you might have used, like DFS etc.
Applying the NEG.flt from the right mouse on a thumb, will add the Negative.flt

I think you have enough to work with Brian...
Hope this helps
Fred

Thanks Fred, I've tried it and it works, but it's a lot slower than my Photoshop method.

Brian

How can it be slower when it has already been setup fo the user as a pre defined filter.
You don't have to do anything.
I was showing you how it was done, but when you want to use it, simply Right Click on the thumb or multiple thumbs, and invoke the Predefined filte "Negative.flt".

Fred

Hi Charlie,
It might be worth looking at a slide scanner. They cost £30 and upwards, connect via USB and can do colour and black and white as well as slides. They positify (?) the negatives automatically.
I've converted loads of slides and negatives using mine and get better results than with my flat bed scanner.
Dust is certainly a problem, I find rubbing/brushing can increase static and can make it worse. I haven't tried anti static liquid cleaners but an old lens blower brush helps.
In Paintshop Pro there is a salt and pepper filter which helps. Adjust>Add/remove noise>Salt and Pepper Filter, which saves some cloning.
 John

Lurcherjohn,

I have had a Minolta 5400 for years. I find it does a good job but it is so slow. I also think they cost the thick end of a grand these days. What were you thinking of?

Tony

Tony,
My scanner is a Minolta, Dimage scan Speed F-2800. Unfortunately it is SCSI connected so I've been transferring the SCSI card for my last three computers. Given the chance now I'd get a USB one. Searching Amazon for slide scanners, there is a whole range from £29, several in the 30s and loads more up to £100+. The ION SLIDE TO PC  has a good write up at about £40.
If there are not many slides etc to do, it would be worth having them done professionally, I've seen an advert quoting 15p each.
John

Fred,

If one starts from RAW files of the negatives it would be nice to invert the file first without any other image editing done. At least for B&W negatives, with color negatives an adjustable filter on the mask in that stage would be nice too. After that the tools of RAW developers work way better and the reason to export RAW in capturing the film images is that the RAW developer tools are so suited for the task IMHO. I use VueScan for scanning films and export a RAW file from Vuescan, That RAW file is actually a straight Tiff file in a DNG disguise but a setting in Vuescan inverts it so Photoshop's ACR (in my case) gets it as a positive. (Qimage does not load it if I recall some trials in the past) The inversion is the only thing Vuescan does on that file. If I recollect it correctly Vuescan can read camera raw files too these days but I have not used it in that sense. It may be a way to get the inversion done as asked in the first message of this thread.

Brian Price already gave a link to the LuLa article on the same subject. I thought of that article too. A tool is mentioned there for the inversion stage: MakeTiff (ColorPerfect). I have no idea whether that is a free tool or part of software you have to purchase. I agree with the writers of that article that camera copying of at least 35mm film is the way to go these days, larger film frames I doubt.

Edit: Though not encouraged by ColorPerfect I think Make Tiff can be used stand alone, it is basically a bundle of open source tools. I also tested the import of a Canon Raw file in VueScan + the inversion and DNG export from VueScan and import in ACR. Looks like that works too. The positive I started with became a negative in ACR.

Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm
November 2014 update, 680+ inkjet media white spectral plots

I wood like to say thank you to all these who have commented on my request for a negative to positive filter.  I have found the article that tonygamble linked to be very informative.  It seems very few dedicated negative scanners are capable of handling 2 ¼ square negatives and any that are capable are very expensive.  My current negative copy process seems very workable for both 35mm and medium format negatives.  It does seem I need to do more research into the work flow of converting the negative pictures into positives and prints.  If anyone has other thoughts on this subject I would be interested in hearing them.

I Just Saw This Scanner, So Will Post It. Don't Know If This Will Help You.

ION Pics 2 SD Photo, Slide and Film Scanner

Makes high-resolution scans of all of your color and black & white slides and film negatives

http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/pics-2-sd

Ya Me

I hope this is not too OT but if that Ion scanner, which is actually a camera not a scanner, works quickly it might suit me.

I think my negative library totals about 50,000. If it took me a minute to scan each frame (and my Minolta 5400 probably takes five minutes!) it would take 833 hours to do the whole library. At three hours a day (max boredom limit) that is still 277 days - a year of tedium. Ten a minute cuts that to a month of tedium and not totally out of court for someone like me.

When someone posts a URL to a bit of kit like this Ion I always look it up on Amazon to see the consumer reviews. Here they almost all refer to problems with tonality, colour balance, etc and we Qimage users can handle that. We can also handle it in batch mode so I don't rule out looking into use of the Ion as part of a work flow. We'd also need a way of renaming the jpgs so they relate to the original neg.

For me the object would be to get 50,000 tolerably good digital images. That would mean that I, or my clients, could flick through them. I would not expect/want them to be repro quality. If a particular image fits the bill then I'd willingly spend the five minutes on that neg in the Minolta. Or use one of the techniques suggested on that LuLa document.

Any thoughts chums?

Tony