DPReview.com is closing April 10th - Find out more

Digitising negatives with EM1 - grateful for advice

Started May 4, 2015 | Discussions thread
MJohns Regular Member • Posts: 255
Re: Digitising negatives with EM1 - grateful for advice

I had a similar opportunity, inheriting lots of color and monochrome slides, negatives, plus my own film from years past.

I found that VueScan preview can scan an entire flatbed scanner full of negatives and present then converted in the preview screen. You can use this to quickly identify the ones you would like to convert. (This is not actually using the flatbed for conversion, but rather as a quick and dirty virtual light-table to sort. You may even be able to not bother with the transparency option, and just let the (white-ish) cover serve as the "black" for your scan of the negatives.)

However, I also found that a 100 slides at a time scanner could scan and convert batches with about the same total work as the preview scan--so that is the way I have mostly gone, including negative conversion. I have used VueScan with corrections as needed in Lightroom.

I suspect that the OP method of conversion using the E-M1 in a purpose built lightbox is better, optically than using a scanner--even a good quality slide scanner. For a (more than complete) discussion of the topic, see Scannerless Digital Capture... from Luminous Landscape. The PP portion is possibly something you will find useful.

 MJohns's gear list:MJohns's gear list
Olympus E-M1 Samyang 7.5mm F3.5 Fisheye Olympus E-5 Olympus OM-D E-M1X Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 50mm 1:2.0 Macro +8 more
Keyboard shortcuts:
FForum PPrevious NNext WNext unread UUpvote SSubscribe RReply QQuote BBookmark MMy threads
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow