Trying to get the sprocket holes visible across a roll. I find that the negs that are slightly thinner show the sprocket holes well but for any dense photos the sprocket holes become invisible and adjusting the sliders doesn’t make them visible.
I am using the buffer at 20% to remove the sprocket holes from the conversion calculation (turning off the buffer completely ruins the overall contrast).
NLP version: 3.0.2
Nikon D7100
Nikon 600mm 2.6 Macro
Negative supply pro light source
Maybe you could try editing each image as two separate versions: one for the actual photo and one for the sprockets. Then you could composite them together in Photoshop, for example.
In this case, I would suggest setting the WhiteClip and BlackClip to negative values for the sprocket version.
Are you sure that these negatives are not just over exposed/too dense and that the thinner negs where you can just see the sprocket holes are in fact properly exposed? In general it isn’t a good idea to let a lot of “non image forming light” stream unfiltered into your lens when camera scanning even though the ‘look’ is pleasing, it is more successful with medium format where there are no sprocket holes to let direct light from your panel through. Maybe just show a thin rebate without the sprocket holes instead, the ‘Cartier-Bresson’ look.
Thanks for getting back to me. I understand the pitfalls and disadvantages of scanning film like this but it’s a customer request. The negatives aren’t significantly over exposed, no more than +1/3-2/3 stop.
I may have to experiment with scanning twice and combining.
I suppose you could also try to select the rebate area only and deal with it separately in Photoshop.
