Fuji Nexia ISO400 - APS negative film

I’ve been scanning a lot of film lately getting ready for a little print showcasing to some private clients. I’ve pretty much been good at getting decent scans from positive film. Negative film has been a bit more difficult, especially when slightly dark or underexposed. I did extensive testing on a few selected images with up to 20 different scans. Here are my findings:

• I use the standard Nikon Scan 4 Software. It is plenty good enough. I see no reason for getting Vuescan or Silverfast.

• Batch scanning often failed. “Select all -> apply settings” simply failed a lot of times for an unknown reason. Half of the images came out as I wanted, the rest had to be rescanned as the settings weren’t applied and the scanner used automatic exposure (which works OK for a flat original, but not a difficult under- or overexposed one!).

• Dark negatives could be greatly improved by adding analogue gain (0,4 – 0,6 worked for most of my difficult exposures)

• I only used digital ICE on the “normal” setting. Plenty good for any negative you haven’t fed the cat with.

• Neat Image on full auto gave much much better results than using GEM in the scanner software. GEM just slows down your scanning anyway, so I was very happy with that! Grain is a big problem when scanning film with CCD scanners. A drum scanner will prove it’s worth here as it can use different apertures to control the spot size of the image-forming light source (or so I’ve heard J ).

• Stay far away from ROC and DEE. Photoshop does a much better job. Besides, as with GEM, it slows down the scan time! Scanning is boring! DEE can leave som nasty noise as well!

• I leave all other bells and whistles untouched. No curves or colour adjustments of any kind. I prefer Photoshop.

• Multi sample scanning worked like a charm and much better than I’d heard before. It has been a popular myth that it makes your images less sharp. On the contrary I found that using 16 x passes improved sharpness and shadow detail. I think this is because the Coolscan does this by sampling one segment of the film 16 times before moving on to the next segment, rather than running back and forth over the entire negative, which might introduce alignment problems.

I actually had a great time scanning. It was a walk down memory lane seeing many old shots I had almost forgotten about.