Hello everyone, I’m just stopping by to share my feedback on my latest acquisition, which has been very useful for managing parallelism. I hope this can help others as well. It’s an accessory that has already been mentioned on this forum, originally designed for aligning telescopes, the Bresser MH-100 (there may be other brands that make similar ones, but this is the one I’ve tested): Bresser | Tête de Trépied à Réglage fin BRESSER MH-100 (Berceau de Hauteur) | Expand Your Horizon.
The advantage is that it’s much smaller and lighter compared to the micrometric head I was using before. Since my setup is vertical, it adds less overhang, which is appreciated for both practicality and stability. The adjustment range is more limited, but for this use, it’s not an issue. Despite its small size, the object is still quite dense, and it is very stable.
It’s not cheap, but it perfectly fulfills its function and has made my scanning process much easier.
Other systems for adjusting telescopes exist, but they are mainly built into the respective heads that often enough are also an inseparable part of the tripod.
Reversing a 2-way tripod head might be usable too. Mount the “camera side” part of the head to the tripod and the camera to the “tripod side”. Something like this could be useful:
Reversing the head takes the heavier part of the head closer to te support structure.
Arno, I find your rig very interesting. I followed the link and I still have a question if you don’t mind. What accessories are you using on the camera side? I believe I have identified the 400mm rail you use and some of the parts also seem from the same brand, but I have not yet fully understood what parts hold the camera and the functionality. Can you raise and lower the camera like that? This seems like a very clever build.
Thanks! Yes, I can move the camera up and down, as well as sideways, and since then also added rotation to enable full alignment.
@Digitizer : Yes I thought about a lens support, because the camera, although it is a light Sony Nex 7 with a very light scanner lens inside some very light old Nikon macro rings to shield external light, it’s still a mass at the end of a pole. I couldn’t think of a way to also support the end of the “lens” (the macro tubes) while retaining up and down freedom of movement though.
Since then, I have been doing another iteration, using a very old Leica ELDIA negative copy device, which is basically the film holder part of a Leica camera, in which the film is held flat between two spring-loaded glass plates. The Nikon film copier is good, but any remaining film curvature will cause (slight) unsharpness due to the limited depth of field of my Minolta 5400 scanner lens, which in itself is excellent for flatness of focus field. Hence, having film between two glass plates will be better and the ELDIA was the easiest way to achieve that reproducibly, since it’s designed by Leica to do exactly that.
I’m still in the process of putting it together, and use the opportunity to make parts of the rig even stiffer. I’ll post the results here when done.
@madera : Forgot: I sent Amazon links to the parts that I used to another user a while back and will see if I can find that back and repost it here. Might take a bit of time…
@madera : that should point to a post I sent to another user (Belinda) and has links to the (most of the) parts that I used to create my previous rig (which is now, again, being updated). There’s also some description on how things were put together. The key thing was to create a rail with a perpendicular mounted Arca-clamp that allows for vertical adjustment of the camera with respect to the slide. If I recall well, then Amazon US has a dedicated part that does the job, but I couldn’t find it at Amazon EU so had to gobble pieces together to do the same thing.
This picture saved my day! I had the 55mm Nikon AF and then the 60mm Nikon AF (non D), but they were getting old and for negatives with dark corners they gave a strong positive vignette unless I did flat field correction in Lightroom - and that wasn’t very consistent. Now I got a 60mm AF-S but only got it to use 11 of my 24 megapixels of my D780! Since I had the longer tube on the ES-2 for the older lenses that extend longer. Now I should have the perfect setup! I don’t think there is much more info than 24 megapixels on a slide? 5600K LED with 95 CRI should be OK right?
Here’s my updated setup for 2025, which is pretty much fully designed and custom built by me. The copy stand features a 8040 C-Beam and lead screw height adjustment, all mounted to a piece or thick furniture board. I use a mirror tile from IKEA as a way to confirm alignment, but there is no need to adjust anything as the copy stand and camera head hold everything perfectly straight out of the gate. The film holder is a motorised version of the toneCarrier 35 mm.
For the light source, I’ve now upgraded to a narrowband RGB+WW light source of my own design - this uses 665 nm red, 530 nm green and 450 nm blue light and seems to give pretty good colour separation in most cases. I can adjust the intensity of each channel separately and save presets for specific films or scan settings.
Looks like a beautiful setup, there has been a lot of debate about a separate R, G & B light source, it would be interesting to know how you are finding it, presumably the main advantage is for colour negative?
I see from your other post in this topic that you actually make and sell the Tonecarrier, I’ve seen a few people recommend it recently.
Yep, I primarily shoot colour negatives so I was curious to see what the hype was about. I’m still new to scanning with this particular light source, but the first results are quite promising. I’ve found that when I neutralise the orange film mask in camera as opposed to in Lightroom, I can push exposure much further on the green and blue channels, which seems to result in better colours after inverting.
It looks quite weird in practice, because you end up scanning with a cyan-ish backlight instead of pure white. I’m not sure if this has been tried before, and it sounds like it shouldn’t work, but surprisingly it kind of does.
I’ve found that when using this light, a straight linear conversion in NLP is usually very close to what I saw when I took the photo, even without any WB adjustments or LUTs. But so far I have only scanned a couple of rolls with this method, so I definitely need to do more testing.
I’ll post some comparisons between this and CS-Lite below; both were processed in NLP using exactly the same settings to give a fair comparison.
And here’s a closer look at the (prototype) light. I plan on bringing this to market as a commercial product later this year, there will be a Kickstarter campaign to help with funding the legal/compliance and production costs for the initial batch (which are quite high because it’s a fully custom design that’s optimised for scanning, not a repackaged video light).
Ok, this topic is very close to my heart. Can you describe in details the process of compensating orange mask with RGB light. What sort of approach you are using? Thanks!
Adding red to green results in yellow, add some more red to get orange, add a mix of blue and cyan to get white. To compensate orange, you have to add even more of blue and cyan…or reduce red and green.
Through an orange mask, the blue channel will be quite underexposed and this is not favourable for finely mixed colours due to the reduced range of values available. Increasing blue and cyan light when scanning increases the range of values and therefore leads to “better” colours.
In real life, camera sensors don’t separate colours cleanly and the resulting mix must be compensated by camera firmware, on top of which, white balance does the rest. For optimal results, the balance of the light channels, camera settings and what Lightroom can do must be within the frame given by what is technically possible. LED output power is limited, as is e.g. the range of what the camera can take etc.
I take 3 separate exposures and combine them using a custom script I wrote in Python. When shooting the photos I set my exposure on a blank piece of film with green backlight on full power, and adjust the shutter speed aiming for the peak to be around 75% toward the right of the historgram. Then with all exposure settings fixed, I switch to red and blue backlights and adjust their power to place the peak in the same place as with the green light.
When you extract the channels from each individual image and combine them back into one RGB triplet, the orange mask disappears because I’m effectively white balancing the orange mask physically with the backlight intensities. So the combined triplet already has a neutral base and is trivial to invert using just a linear process of transforming each pixel value to (100% - itself).
The Python program is not perfect yet, but I have been getting good results that are quite close to what I was getting with NLP before.
If you’d like to play with the RAW files, you can find the ones for this example here
Note you can also do this in one shot by just turning on all the channels at the same time and adjusting R/G/B brightness until the histogram peaks overlap. This is slightly worse for colour separation than the 3 shot method, but much faster and compatible with NLP.
When shooting this way, you end up with a very cyan/blueish light source which negates the orange mask in camera without needing to adjust white balance in post. You can push exposure much further to the right than with white light because you’re not limited by the red channel clipping.
I use the live RGB histogram in camera with WB fixed at 5500 K - but this is just my preference, doesn’t really matter as long as it’s consistent across the 3 shots. In my combining script I do not use the in camera WB setting at all - I have a calibration function that adjusts the gains for each channel more precisely based on a scan of a blank piece of film.
It does not need to be 100% spot on in camera, if you can line up your R/G/B peaks relative to each other the rest can be done in software.
If it were, you’d not need the calibration, which is some kind of white balance.
I mostly use UniWB, which provides fairly high precision, depending on camera model.
Here’s what Exiftool takes from a UniWB balanced capture:
[MakerNotes] WB RGGB Levels As Shot : 1024 1024 1024 1024
[MakerNotes] Color Temp As Shot : 4644
[MakerNotes] WB RGGB Levels Auto : 1796 1024 1024 1577
[MakerNotes] Color Temp Auto : 5105
[MakerNotes] WB RGGB Levels Measured : 1796 1024 1024 1577
[MakerNotes] Color Temp Measured : 5105
The first line shows 1024 for all channels. Line 4&6 show the K of my Kaiser Plano backlight.
