Scanning Polachrome

[kevss]

It's seems scanning Polachrome is just about hopeless. I do ok with Polapan but with Polachrome, get these weird lines. Using the Nikon 4000. thanks.

 

[birdpix]

We'd run into problems duplicating that stuff traditionally in a lab setting in the past due to the weird film base/reflective prismatic patterns it would give - cant imagine scanning it would work very well with a little slide scanner like the nikon...

The easiest, but certainly NOT high quality in ANY way, was to just project the image on a sheet of white board and photograph the projected image on tungsten film. Color balancing/exposure was sometimes tricky and quality stunk, but most of the time we were doing time sensitive engineering/documentation type stuff where speed was the priority and not quality.

I had SOME limited success usiing a constant light source chroma-pro duplicator with ektachrome dupe film, but it was hit-n-miss quality wise depending on subjects (large empty areas like sky or white areas caused halations and the filtration was unlike ANY other film! Maybe someone can recomend a pro lab that can dupe to regular slide film, but of course you've still lost a full generation that way too...

I know some magazines that printed polachrome images, so there has to be a way. Perhaps high end drum scanners react differect than smaller slide scanners like the Nikon but I dont for sure...
--
Eric in Florida

 

[luxor2]

The wierd lines are part of the optics of the film, parallel RGB lines similar to your LCD screen RBG triplets. There are 1000 RGB triplets per inch, 3000 lines per inch total. You have the choice of scanning at a low resolution to average the triplets together, or scan at a high enough resolution to completely image each of the 3000 lines per inch (hard to do with most scanners). Then blur in Photoshop to get the lines to be less obvious. I suggest scanning at several resolutions and seeing what give the best results.

The bottom line is that the lines are part of the image, and are what makes this film a unique medium. There is a long history of Additive color films that precede Polachrome.