Copying color negatives with camera

3) By a long long way the best results will be obtained by pre-filtering the lightsource in such a way as to get a capture that matches the native colour characteristics of the cameras sensor and accounts for the colour temperature of the lightsource and the films mask characteristics. This is pretty tricky to do, involving quite a bit of testing but the differences in the final result are like chalk and cheese and the resulting files are far easier to edit.

So I would probably be better off with filtering the flash head with some gel filters that can color correct for the mask? What kind of filters? I've glanced at some color enlarger heads on ebay and they seem to use a combination of yellow, magenta and cyan filters to balance out the light. Are those kinds of gels sufficient?

4) Despite the accepted wisdom that film only needs to be scanned at say 8 megapixels becuase it is only holding that much data the truth is you really need far higher levels of resolution to extract the information in the neg without alaising the grain. As an axample I have regularly scanned fuji 400 in sections for a final stitched output of about 100 megapixels, at this resolution you actually do resolve the grain of the film without alaising, the alasing causes the grain to look much larger than it really is and messes up many of the subtleties of the neg. Once fully edited the files are then downsampled to something more sensible like 16 megapixels and then print beutifully and look much more detailed than any other scanning method. Frankly even the best commercial scanners have insufficient resolution to really do the job properly. Lower speed films like Fuji Reala need around 200 mp or more at capture. I realize most people will think I am talking theough my hat but I promise as you go higher to these extremes the granularity of the film capture shrinks and becomes more tightly focused making for a subtly better final result. Ultimtely with scanning there are two approaches to resolution, either scan low enough so grain is smoothed out altogether ( which will greatly soften textural details etc but is fine for web and small prints) or scan high enough to sharply render all the grain in the film, anything in between is just messy.

I figured I would try this method only for the photos I love the most, thankfully my hobby as a film photographer was short. Right now I have been capturing slides and negatives at a 1:1.5 ratio(this is based on the marking of the full-frame macro lens I use) because of the size of my camera's sensor. Will going to 1:1 be sufficient for an APS-C sized sensor or should I go higher like 2:1?

5) When exposing go for a histogram that is roughly centered, exposing to the right does not help with neg scanning and underexposure will cause radical increases in image noise in the highlights of the inverted image, it is totally different to how we would work with normal digital capture. Small deviations from correct exposure can and will mess up the colour in the highlights or shadows and make editing much harder, you must use manual exposure methods for the capture and by far a filtered flash is the best light source but I have had great results with high powered and filtered LEDs.

That is what I was wondering. I have seen some websites say to expose to the right on the histogram, but when I look at the histogram in Silkypix, the red channel is clipped if that happens. It didn't sound right to me that losing some of that red information was good when inverting. So I have been exposing in the center because it was the only way I could safely assume all red, blue and green channels were not being clipped off.

There is way more I could say, but hopefully this gives those interested some food for thought and potential pathways to follow.

cheers

Brad Nichol

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Trying to make the complex simple

Thanks it has been giving me ideas to try out. Once I get a rosco swatchbook in the mail I'll try out the flash filtering.