Phocus does not open FFF file, at least the version that still runs on my old Mojave OSX
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If you do revisit Flexcolor then I should probably say that I was referring to the colour negative conversions, and the resulting colour. Perversely some of the setups that Imacon provided have ludicrous levels of unsharp mask built in so the technique has always been to change that and resave the setup under a new name. There is an extra folder of fiilm setups installed as I remember but you have to access them to get them into the dropdown. Theyâre all old films of course but still easy to try in order to get close.
However I can see the sense in mastering NLP because you can also use that with your Minolta scans and maybe even camera scans using youâre collection of high end sensors (that Monochrom should be great for B&W). Quite a lot on here about suitable setups for the GFX, but as I understand it none of Fujiâs own lenses work well for film copying.
Great introduction to camera scanning with NLP by Mark D Segal here:
The FB forum âDigitizing film with a digital cameraâ has very good content also, for instance:
and NLP has its own FB forum of course:
According to this page, the Flextight scanners resolve at about the same ppi figures as a camera scan taken with 3-pass scans with a 60 Mpixel monochrome sensor camera. The three captures would need to be inverted and combined and that isnât possible with NLP and LrC today.
Does it make sense to have images with such a quality? Do you need this quality for your prints? Or do you want the best possible base for refining at a later time?
I do like to tackle technical challenges and Iâd get some stuff from Phase One or Fuji and Novoflex and have someone scan the negatives for me (the boring part of the process) and - oh - someone to add keywords and Iâd also want more drive space, top notch monitors and and and âŚ
Unless I win in Lotto, itâs not going to happen.
Oh, I am not really talking about ppi, but dynamic range and fidelity @Digitizer, and when you lose that in the Flextight scan it also corrupt the grain in images shot with Kodak Tri-X pushed to 1600 (sometimes 3200). I know I am getting better resolution, in theory, than my Sony A7RII Monochrome, but when I compare the results I know that the tones and grain is truer than the results I got with the Flextight. I think I would be content with Nikon Coolscans of this project by the way, as far as I remember from back in the days, but I was scared my memories might have failed me on the quality of that scanner, so I took the hard path. The funny thing is that the Sony Monochrome looks so similar in noise structure and tone to Tri-X pushed to 1600 when you shoot that camera at 3200 I donât believe I will ever shot another roll of film again, since I anyway use my Sigma for color work. Kyle McDougall uses the Pentax 120mm f. 4 macro @Alex_Y for his medium format Fuji, with great results seemingly. He has a quite nice Youtube channel where you can find a lot of tips for camera scanning. If you are planning on scanning with your Leica Monochrom, then donât buy the Leica Elmarit 60mm macro.. Listen to @Harry. The Leitz Focotar might be an option, but I havenât tried it at 1:1 yet since I am waiting for another extension ring. The contrast is nicer on the Focotar than the Sigma lens though, and the Sigma wouldnât work on Leica Monochrom anyway,but my bet is that the Rodagon is the best choice around for a Leica Monochrom setup. It is as sharp all through the frame as the Focotar is in the center, and wouldnât it work on the Fuji as well @Harry?
The Apo-Rodagon 75mm f4 1:1 is really good on a 61MP Sony A7RIV, but the results are over on the FB forum âDigitizing film with a digital cameraâ, the â2xâ comes a close second on full frame, tests with Vladâs Test Target by Peter Orth:
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Schneider Kreuznach also make/made suitable âbellowsâ lenses that seem to come highly recommended, scarcer and more difficult to find information, and there may be different versions for different magnifications, hard to unravel. No personal experience of any of them.
SK 80mm f5.6 Makro Symmar
SK 80mm f5.6 Apo-Digitar
SK 90mm f4.5 Apo-Digtar
(itâs possible that those first two are the same lens)
For medium format then 120mm versions of these lenses come into the frame
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You can still get those lenses from Novoflex.
The problem with Schneider is that they have renamed their series of lenses and redesigned their industrial lens site, but you can get data sheets with MTF curves or see them directly on the website, e.g.: PYRITE F4.5/85/0.5x-2.0x mm large format lens | Schneider-Kreuznach
Rodenstock has lenses like this one: Apo-Macro-Sironar digital | Rodenstock Photo Optics
Whether these lenses are âbetter or worseâ than e.g. the well-regarded Sigma 70mm and 105mm macro lenses is hard to tell from technical data. With 60 Mpixel sensors, happiness starts at 100 lp/mm approximately. Also, youâd probably need deeper wallets than with e.g this lens.
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Yes, and you also have to live with whatever software gets along with the scanner.
If you canât sell the scanner, you might as well take it apart and use the built-in lens.
Anyways, unless we use standard camera lenses, weâll have to deal with adapters, tubes or bellows etc. and total cost can climb to an area where âcoolâ might be the only reason.
Ah yes, the Laowa 65mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO, I think you have recommended that before. It looks like it could be very good for Fuji X-Trans and any other APS-C sensor though I hadnât realised that it was specifically optimised for APS-C, so I suppose not recommended for full frame. However much cheaper than Fujiâs own 80mm Macro which I believe is very good also since it was the lens that effectively got 10/10 in that photomacrography.net 0.66x test (also just with an APS-C sensor) and was the only lens to exceed the centre and edge performance of the 75mm Apo-Rodagon f4.5 2x which is the one I use. Iâd love to see results from both the Laowa and the Fuji with Vladâs Test Target.
No need to wonder. The scanner market has dried-up RELATIVE TO the cost of product development, manufacturing, marketing and support. And the FACT that we are getting better results faster from multi-purpose digital cameras and not too expensive set-ups for using them as scanners pretty much puts the nail in the coffin. Like so many technologies, they were fine in their time but they have been eclipsed, and Negative Lab Pro has put the icing on the cake.
Real nice crisp result Digitizer.
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Yeah, @Mark_Segal, I believe you summarised the situation, but I have to say I long for a Minolta Dimage or Nikon Coolscan with a faster workflow and high end results, utilising the nano technology which is available now. Just a small thing standing on your desk which you can feed your negatives to. If anyone would launch such a machine I think it would get a large audience and people would pay a lot for it. I have spent 5000$ for my rig, the various lenses I have bought, the monochrome conversion, the Sony A7RII I sacrificed, and still I can only scan black and white. I donât miss the scanner here I stand every evening scanning seventy perfect scans every night, but my back doesnât love it, thatâs for sure. But I do have to say I have rediscovered analog photography. The process is very similar to darkroom work. Dynamic, varied and you have to be 100% focused every minute to get the adequate results. Negative Lab Pro is a splendid tool, which is also mirroring the analog process in a way that the scanner softwares never did, at least for me. Photography was never sitting at a desk to me staring into a computer screen, and when it became that I lost much of the interest, which made me postpone or even cancel many of my projects. Now I canât wait to go into my studio every evening after the kid is in bed and attack my negatives full force. Itâs a dream come true.
Yes Kristian - that Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 is the best desktop scanner I ever used, albeit slow. I still have it parked in a closet and retain SilverFast 8 âjust in caseâ, but I doubt Iâll be using it again. Watching the supply of high-end film scanners dwindle and then disappear, we knew the handwriting was on the wall and we knew why - not enough market. I know of one manufacturer that was contemplating a new film scanner, but with the passage of time itâs clear their management abandoned the idea for the same reasons. Fast forward, cameras are taking this function over quickly, but some are better than others. Much depends on the details of the set-up, so I put a lot of time and effort into that. With the camera set-up described in my PhotoPXL.com article and the combination of Lr and NLP it all works just fine whether for B&W or colour, and the image editing options are infinite, which is both a blessing and a curse.
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Thank you for the link @Mark_Segal. I will read your article thoroughly before I start processing my images. I have scanned around 150 of 777 negatives the last three nights. Learning as I am working, but thank God I had some guidelines (mostly from this forum and all from users of Negative Lab Pro) before I started.
I was considering buying the Minolta Dimage Elite 5400 already back in the days when it came out for personal use, growing tired of being dependent of the studio I worked at the time, but instead I bought the Nikon D200 and sold all my analog equipment, which is a moment of shame for me. I guess my activitiy now is a compensation for this foolish act. But, at the time, people were seriously claiming that the original Canon 1Ds could compete with 4X5 inch film. I could see this wasnât the case, but was caught in the whirlpool of megapixels and the craze of finally having images with no grain (people like James Cameron is still stuck in this mentality, destroying his old masterpieces like the Terminator movies with his restoration). Would love to get my hands on one and camera scan a sheet film and send it to my old boss..
Do you think the Minolta Dimage Elite 5400 could compete with the Flextight @Mark_Segal?
Is it better than the Nikon Coolscans?
I guess I use Minolta equipment now, since all Sony cameras are based on Minolta patents they bought two decades ago. Sony should have continued making scanners and utilised the knowledge from Minolta. They would have earned a lot of street cred for that act for sure.
Hi Kristian, back in 2015 in collaboration with Mr. Christopher Campbell, we produced a sufficient number of well-controlled tests with a variety of equipment and media to come to some rather clear conclusions about effective scanner resolution. That article, titled The New Epson V850 Pro Scanner was published on Luminous-Landscape in early 2015 and should still be available but under what access conditions today I donât know as the site has undergone several changes of ownership and management. At the time we used the USAF 1951 target for measuring effective resolution. Today I would use the Thorlabs etched glass version, which is much better than any film-based resolution target. But glass targets couldnât work in an Imacon scanner anyhow because they donât bend. Therefore, I have what we could test then.
So, the key here is that optical resolution as defined by the number of photosites per cm on the scanner sensor exceeds effective resolution which is based on the measured output of the whole scanner design/build. Using the USAF is always a bit judgmental once one gets into the finer slices, but the relative guidance of what it shows between devices is pretty clear. We found that the Minolta Scan Elite 5400âs (optical resolution of 5400) effective resolution ranged between c. 4600 to 5100 depending on the reading, whereas the Imacon 848âs (optical resolution of 8000 - same as Flextight X5) produced effectively about 5800, both of which, compared with the limitations of the media itself are fine. For resolution, the Minolta outperformed the Nikon Super Coolscan 5000EDâs (optical resolution 4000) effective resolution about 3200. The Minolta scanner won both EISA and TIPA awards for its superior optical resolution.
Minolta optics were always excellent - I remember from when they first started marketing 35mm cameras in North America in the mid-1950s. What happened, however, with the evolution of market conditions, is that they could not commercially justify production of film scanners. After they reached the point of having to produce in small batches with intervals of shut-down in-between, it simply became non-viable to continue with that, so they stopped in March 2006. And around the same time they vacated the consumer photography business altogether. It is after all business, and sentimentality only carries one so far. Sad to say, but thatâs reality. Nikon also stopped scanner production for the same reasons.
Now, flipping over to digital cameras, I owned a Canon 1Ds original 11 MP camera. With top of the line Canon lenses it outperformed Hasselblad film cameras, to the extent at the time used Hasselblads could be bought cheaply because many studios in North America were converting from Hasselblad to Canon 1Ds. However, 4x5 film was still beyond the reach of an 11MP camera of that vintage, so those claims you mention were and are exaggerated. With todayâs digital cameras, however, especially when we get into the 60 MP range and beyond (e.g. Phase One) - totally different story. I still very much respect those prints made from very large format negatives, but really, at some level, digital technology for sheer clarity and resolution canât be beat.
Itâs a matter of personal taste, but I donât regret the passing of film âgrainâ. Personally I look upon it as a limitation of film-era technology, but it can be used to artistic advantage. so be it. I still very much respect what we could do with film and film scanners, but I believe what we can do now is a grade beyond in all respects. The caveat though is always in the details of what we use and how we use it.
Very profound thoughts @Mark_Segal, and I do agree with it, and I remember the Canon 1Ds as an absolute marvel when it came too. I never liked the aesthetics of the optics, but thatâs personal taste, and I do admire a lot of photographs by photographers who has based their practice on the Canon system. I do though see benefits to film versus digital sensors, not saying that one is better than the other, just that there are certain advantages to the color depth which can not be replicated with a CCD or CMOS sensor. I do everything with the Sigma Foveon camera system for that reason. There is a feeling that there is something behind the surface. But when I photograph my everyday life itâs with the Sony A7s. because itâs fast reliable and I get the moments, which is the essence of photography anyway. If Henri Cartier-Bresson would have lived today I donât think he would have chosen a Leica M camera, but more likely a micro four thirds camera, like the OM-1, or similar. Stealth and versatility trumps quality in most cases. I donât really shoot analog anymore, what I am scanning now is my last project, but my partner does, and I can see that she enjoys the process much more than I do. She loves to dwell in it, while I try to get rid of it as fast as possible, get it done. I do though think that there is no digital camera out there that can match a really good c-print, in quality yes, but not qualities. Itâs a bit like vinyl versus compact disc. But nostalgia can be a trap. Merge the best parts of the past with the best parts of the present is the solution. To me itâs all about optics really. That is where I find the marvel, how lenses draw different images, which we emotionally perceive differently. Interesting that the Minolta could compete with the Flextight. I am not surprised really. Some of the most beautiful lenses I know of were made by Minolta, and Sony has certainly benefited from merging with them, or eating them. I donât know what to call it. My favorite lens was made in collaboration with Minolta; the Leitz 40mm Summicron C. The sharpness isnât the greatest wide open, but it just has a look that makes the world look more human. Nostalgia for grain is a bit fetishist I agree, but in the world of optics itâs not limited to nostalgia, but to render images that look different than the clinical lenses of today. More pulsating, alive, the aberrations giving new momentum to the images. We are after all drawing with light and the lenses is the brush. The sensor or film only the canvas.
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There is a pdf of Markâs 2015 V850 article here:
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You state my case @Mark_Segal!
And a beautiful image of Bayon Temple in Angkor Wat @Mark_Segal. I basically lived there for three months. Have been there more than a hundred times.
Thank you, glad you like it. Yes, itâs hard to go wrong in that place. One could live there for a long time and still not do it complete justice. I only had a full day, but I was provided with an experienced guide and a driver, so that helped immensely - and it was only several years after the end of the civil war of the 1990s, so there was no flood of tourists yet. Those photos were one of my last set with a film camera.