Scanning Kodachrome Slides

[Paul Glendell]

As the original starter of this thread I can't believe it is still going. I didn't expect it to be such an interesting question.  Anyway as a follow up what about black and white net scanning what do people do with that these days.  Again, as mentioned above the nikon ( and I expect other ) scanners emphasis the grain so how do you all get around that.  Is it possible to digi copy as recommended above by Rober Brooks and then flip it to positive ? If so what software ?  Please excuse my ignorance/

[Martyn]

Yes, monochrome and colour negs as well….invert in photoshop….

 

[Robert M Estall]

noting a recent sale of a couple of old girls on the streets of Volendam, I thought the tones & balance pretty awful so nipped into the relevant file of TIFFs and sure enough; a Kodachrome Scan! That must have been from early days with my newly acquired LS9000. There was displayed that strange graininess in the flesh tone and at 100%, a few classic examples of the edge fringing. Improving the colour balance was quick and I guess it took a couple of minutes with the clone tool to tidy up the fringes. Certainly a lot quicker than finding the slide and firing up the scanner. 

 

Dont all rush to Volendam, the shot is 40 years old and I doubt that there are many people still wandering the streets wearing the traditional dress of Noord Holland. It looks like there there may be one or two gals pegged out by the quayside doing a bit of lace-making for the tourists. And huge clogs as photo opps. Not my bag!

 

next time I'm doing a run of archival images, I'll include it and delete the old scan, but no rush, I think this is the first sale of the image in about ten years on offer.

 

 

 

 

 

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[geofk]

I've just finished digitally duping over 5000 b & W infra red (HIE) negs using a Nikon D300 on Programme mode,  a Nikkor 105mm macro + ring on a Beseler Dual Dichro duplicator set on tungsten. The key to getting this right was the Control My Nikon tethering software which is simply indispensible. Oh, and I had converted the old 3.5mm camera trigger socket at the back to a 2.5 mm one so that the camera can be fired from the duplicator. Each neg strip (6 frames) was dusted down, put in the holder and shot within 30 secs. My daily throughput was averaging about 350 frames.  I only need to manually intervene where there was an obvious subject failure of the automated exposure. I didn't need to bracket exposures as negs are well within a D300's exposure capability. View NX2 took care of the exposure inversion and brightness, contrast and so on.

My Coolscan 8000 can't hold a candle to that kind of workload and wasn't in the running anyway because it's too slow and digital ice doesn't work on silver based images.

This dust problem and the sharpness issues are, I think, related to the light source used. In the darkroom days there were distinct differences between point light source and diffusion enlargers.  A point light source created all sorts of dust problems but few disputed its ability to produce the sharpest images. The dust problems were more apparent because of the Callier Effect which produced a higher contrast thus exaggerating dust and scratches. My Beseler has a well diffused tungsten source so the Callier Effect is almost non-existent.  

[Robert M Estall]

350 frames a day, that is impressive! I think 35 a day was pretty good going when I was hammering through my archive with the Coolscan 9000. As it happens, I also have a Beseler copy rig over in the corner which hasn't seen any action for quite a while, but it's such a fantastic bit of kit that I'm not letting anyone take it off my hands for a silly offer. The external voltage stabiliser packed up a few years back which is a bit of a problem but I have a couple of spare bulbs, so there may be a future for the old thing yet. And yes, I always used the tungsten option. The flash route was just ill-conceived and trashed many a very expensive bulb as it jostled past it.