Workflow Needed for Archival Quality Scans of 35mm Color Negatives

[35mmSlideFan]

Hello All,

I've been agonizing over this for a week or two, scoured the web, scoured forums here and elsewhere and with so many conflicting suggestions and so many pros and cons, I'm nearing my wits end. This forum seems to be the friendliest, most informed, and best organized, so here I am.

First of all, despite my username, I'm done scanning slides and now have access to new equipment, new software, and loads of color negatives. I'm most eager to scan these for long term archival purposes.

Here's what I have to work with:
Operating System: Linux Ubuntu 12.04 (but I do have access to Photoshop on another system)
Scanner: A Nikon Supercoolscan 4000 with an SA-21 Strip Film Adapter
Software: Vuescan 9.02.04

These color negatives date from circa 1977 through the early 2000s and are cut into strips of 4 to 6. They aren't in great shape, and they weren't taken by a professional photographer with serious equipment, but they have tremendous sentimental value. I don't know exactly how many there are, but it's certainly a few hundred. I hope to never get rid of the negatives, but I still would like these scans ultimately to be archival, the definitive digital source for the images.

I don't mind doing a little cropping here and there, but I don't particularly want to spend too much time with each image. I'd like to go through roll by roll steadily and diligently.

I've more or less decided that I'm going with going with 48bit RGB scans at 4000dpi and using an sRGB color space saved to TIFF files. Beyond those facts is where I've been having problems...

For Color Balance settings: Neutral? Manual (with RGB set to 1/1/1)? White Balance? Simply "None?" Setting Color Balance to Auto levels looks gorgeous, but that can't be good for archival quality, is it?

A little "Light" infrared filtering also looks great and works wonders , but I've always heard it's a sin to do that for archival images as they ultimately reduce the image quality.

So please help! I own the equipment, I own the negatives, and I'd like to make the definitive digital source for these images.

Given all of those parameters, what would you do?

Many thanks!

 

[Light Guru]

I work at a history library doing digital preservation and I digitize slides and negatives all the time.

Here are my thoughts on your post.

I've more or less decided that I'm going with going with 48bit RGB scans at 4000dpi and using an sRGB color space saved to TIFF files.

4000dpi is extreme overkill. We digitize slides and negatives at 1200dpi that will give you a fair amount of resolution for a decent size print. Any dpi over 2400 is not going to give you any higher quality image. Also keep in mind that the higher the dpi you scan at the longer it will take to scan.

Also make sure you are not saving as a compressed tiff, go with uncompressed tiffs.

For Color Balance settings: Neutral? Manual (with RGB set to 1/1/1)? White Balance? Simply "None?" Setting Color Balance to Auto levels looks gorgeous, but that can't be good for archival quality, is it?

A little "Light" infrared filtering also looks great and works wonders , but I've always heard it's a sin to do that for archival images as they ultimately reduce the image quality.

Scan with no color, white balance, or filtering at all. In archiving you are preserving not restoring (that can be done later if you choose). Before doing any scanning you need to calibrate your scanners and have your scanning software set to your calibration profile that you created for that scanner. This will give you color consistent scans across multiple scanners and insure that the colors on all your scans are consistent.

Another thing to consider when archiving slides that that it is rather common to find writing on the cardboard around the slide. We scan and archive the front and backs of the slides as well to preserve any writing on them.

Organize the slides into smaller groups in boxes with multiple folders per box then name the digital files with corresponding box and folder numbers so that you can locate the original slide or negative if you need to.

I also recommend not letting the scanning software do any auto cropping. After spending way to much time rescanning slides that got auto cropped incorrectly we have found it much better to manually select an oversized scan area in the scanning software and then doing a quick crop in photoshop while your next image is scanning. So yes you will want photoshop on the same machine you are scanning at.

 

[Helen B]

I have no experience of formal archiving, I only archive my own

If you want to get the most information out of the negatives, I would suggest scanning at the full scanner resolution of 4000 spi unless you have some good reason not to. I actually prefer to use a higher spi, such as 8000, to get a more accurate representation of the film original, but the CS 4000 will not do that, and the resultant file sizes are huge.

Colour calibration is difficult for negatives, easy for slides. There could be a case for making an archival record of the negative as a negative, and generating a positive from that using, for example, a ColorPerfect / ColorNeg type of workflow. You would also record the information on the film edge regarding the film type. Colour neg film is more colour accurate than slide film, but that accuracy is harder to control in some ways.

Why sRGB? You would probably be discarding some of the gamut.

As for the ICE (IR defect removal) my experience with the CS 4000 is that it does very little damage to the overall image quality. I suggest doing tests for yourself. On the other hand, it may alter the details of the image where there is damage or dust etc, and you would not be able to tell from the scan what alterations had been made, so it isn't really archival.

I guess that you know not to let the software choose the black and white points.

 

[Light Guru]

If you want to get the most information out of the negatives, I would suggest scanning at the full scanner resolution of 4000 spi unless you have some good reason not to. I actually prefer to use a higher spi, such as 8000, to get a more accurate representation of the film original, but the CS 4000 will not do that, and the resultant file sizes are huge.

That's over kill you are not going to pull out any more info it of a 35mm slide scanning at 4000 or 8000 then you would scanning at 1200 or 2400. You scanning at that high of a resolution won't give you a more accurate representation of the film original. A slide or negative only has so much information contained in it to begin with, and scanning at 1200 or 2400 is going to be able to gather all the info that is in the slides and negatives. All you are doing when scanning at 4000 or 8000 is wasting time as it takes much longer for a scanner to finish that scan and creating a file that is much larger then need be.

 

[Helen B]

I think that we are going to have to differ on that. I see more info in a 4000 spi scan than in a 2400 spi scan, and I wonder what scanners and holders you have used to come to your conclusion. Going above 4000 spi to 5600 spi or 8000 spi does not usually resolve more object detail, but it does improve the resolution of the film structure itself, and thus better maintains the particular characteristics of the film type. With something like Kodachrome it does even improve resolution of object detail, if it is there.

All of this assumes that the scanners are not being pushed beyond their true resolution.

I've been scanning 35 mm film at 4000 spi minimum (apart from comparative tests when I get a new scanner) since 2000, and I am very grateful that I didn't reduce the resolution to save space back then. Nowadays disk space is not a problem, of course.

 

[35mmSlideFan]

4000dpi is extreme overkill. We digitize slides and negatives at 1200dpi that will give you a fair amount of resolution for a decent size print. Any dpi over 2400 is not going to give you any higher quality image. Also keep in mind that the higher the dpi you scan at the longer it will take to scan.

I'm afraid I must side with Helen B. on this one. 4000dpi is the standard I set for myself when doing slides earlier, and I'm sticking with it. I do notice a difference.

In archiving you are preserving not restoring (that can be done later if you choose).

Thank you for explicitly stating this, and theoretically I agree with you entirely. The trouble is, I do a "raw" scan (meaning without any filtering, corrections, etc.) and then I scan the same image with white balance, infrared, etc. I then send the first scan to a Photoshop guru that I know, and he can make it look very good using his Photoshop chops, but it still doesn't look as good as the auto-corrected scan. I give him the auto-corrected scan and with a few Photoshop tweaks on that, he has it looking truly stellar.

 

[bsinmich]

For preservation purposes what are you storing this on? CDs and DVDs that we burn on our computers are not known for their long life before some deterioratiom begins. At this time I am in the process of saving 35 years of condo history that has been stored and moved around for 34 years. We decided on scanning all of the minutes and financials to thumb drives and then storing them in a safe deposit box.

 

[35mmSlideFan]

There could be a case for making an archival record of the negative as a negative, and generating a positive from that using, for example, a ColorPerfect / ColorNeg type of workflow. You would also record the information on the film edge regarding the film type. Colour neg film is more colour accurate than slide film, but that accuracy is harder to control in some ways.

That is an idea - is that what you do?

Why sRGB? You would probably be discarding some of the gamut.

Well, this is another huge issue that I wrestled with when doing the slides. Sure, I do think I lose a little gamut here and there and I've chosen to accept that. For long term compatibility, I thought that sRGB was more universal and didn't require as much proprietary software.

Was this the right decision? Not sure, but I'm generally very happy with having scanned the slides in their "raw" state in sRGB and if only for consistencies sake, plan on doing the same with the color negatives.

As for the ICE (IR defect removal) my experience with the CS 4000 is that it does very little damage to the overall image quality. I suggest doing tests for yourself.

Good to know, and an excellent idea. Like the sRGB, despite being archival, I may be willing to suffer ever so slight loss for the tremendous ICE benefits. For the slides, I stayed clear of ICE, but these negatives are in worse shape and the defects are far more visible.

On the other hand, it may alter the details of the image where there is damage or dust etc, and you would not be able to tell from the scan what alterations had been made, so it isn't really archival.

True.... My concern relates to my previous response above. If a Photoshop guru can't make the image look as good as the software then why am I not using it? In principal I agree with your above statement, but the infrared filter set to "Light" in my Vuescan software makes a hugely significant difference.

I guess that you know not to let the software choose the black and white points.

Definitely not if I'm doing it "raw"....

 

[35mmSlideFan]

For preservation purposes what are you storing this on? CDs and DVDs that we burn on our computers are not known for their long life before some deterioratiom begins. At this time I am in the process of saving 35 years of condo history that has been stored and moved around for 34 years. We decided on scanning all of the minutes and financials to thumb drives and then storing them in a safe deposit box.

I used to use CDs and DVDs, but now all the images are saved to my hard drives which are automatically backed up offsite via the internet. CrashPlan+ is my service of choice and they have many TB of my data, not just pictures.

 

[Light Guru]

I see more info in a 4000 spi scan than in a 2400 spi scan

If the slide or negative is of high quality and had really great exposure sure you might get a little more, especially if they were larger negatives then 35mm slides. But the images the OP is talking about are not like that.

These color negatives date from circa 1977 through the early 2000s and are cut into strips of 4 to 6. They aren't in great shape, and they weren't taken by a professional photographer with serious equipment, but they have tremendous sentimental value.

Based on this info scanning at anything more then 2400 would most likely be a wast of time as it takes much longer to scan. Pixel peepers who zoom in on a photo 300% might notice a difference but your average person won't be able to tell the difference.

We are not talking about fine art negatives here we are talking about snapshots with sentimental value.

Scanning lots of negatives or slides takes a lot of time. At the historical library I work at we use 1200 for slides and negatives because its a good balance between speed and quality. The resulting image is fine for 99% of what people will need it for.

Organize the slides into smaller groups in boxes with multiple folders per box then name the digital files with corresponding box and folder numbers so that you can locate the original slide or negative if you need to.

The reason I mentioned this is because if you do come across an image that you may want to try and scan at higher resolutions to try and get a small amount of more data or a higher pixel dimensions for a big print it makes it easy to find the original slide or negative that you want and scan just that one giving it much more time.

 

[Josh66]

Here's what I have to work with:
Operating System: Linux Ubuntu 12.04 (but I do have access to Photoshop on another system)

What I would do - get a decent Epson scanner (V600, V700/750) and install this:
EPSON Download Center

One thing though - it is going to take a very long time. If you're still shooting film, it's probably worth it. If this is going to be a one time thing, you will spend a lot of hours sitting in front of a computer - it may be better to just send them out to a lab.

 

[35mmSlideFan]

What I would do - get a decent Epson scanner (V600, V700/750) and install this:
EPSON Download Center

Not an option for me, but thank you. I really need to work within the hardware parameters that I sated.

One thing though - it is going to take a very long time. If you're still shooting film, it's probably worth it. If this is going to be a one time thing, you will spend a lot of hours sitting in front of a computer - it may be better to just send them out to a lab.

Well, I don't shoot film, but I'm always going to turn up film that I need to scan. I recognize that it's a big job... which is why I've been agonizing over getting my settings right from the beginning.

 

[Josh66]

I then send the first scan to a Photoshop guru that I know, and he can make it look very good using his Photoshop chops, but it still doesn't look as good as the auto-corrected scan. I give him the auto-corrected scan and with a few Photoshop tweaks on that, he has it looking truly stellar.

So basically you're just messing with the guy? Why don't you give him the 'good' scan from the start? Hell, why don't you just give him the film and let him scan it himself from the beginning?

 

[35mmSlideFan]

I then send the first scan to a Photoshop guru that I know, and he can make it look very good using his Photoshop chops, but it still doesn't look as good as the auto-corrected scan. I give him the auto-corrected scan and with a few Photoshop tweaks on that, he has it looking truly stellar.

So basically you're just messing with the guy? Why don't you give him the 'good' scan from the start? Hell, why don't you just give him the film and let him scan it himself from the beginning?

No, to the contrary. He and I spoke about it all at some length beforehand and he wanted to try to work on the image before seeing what the "good" version generated by the scanner software looked like. That was his choice - certainly no intentional messing around on my part. And alas, he doesn't own a film scanner - he only works with digital images from digital cameras.