Copying slides/negs with pixel shift on the Z8

[monte12345]

The plain fact is the 35mm film doesn't have the the resolution to support more than 6-24 mp depending on the film.

 

[PMB]

• when focusing the AF system always, always grabs the grain in the image. It's mindless. The resolution is so much better than the negative that the focusing system does not even notice elements of the image.

I'm not so sure that is a bad thing or mindless. In all my years of darkroom printing I used a "Grain Magnifier" to focus on the grain, ensuring that the enlarger was properly focused. Sharp grain = sharp print.

Yes, I too used a magnifier - looked a bit like a microscope - too focus the grain before making a print.

Are you suggesting an alternate procedure for film copying that doesn't involve having sharp grain? Why wouldn't the elements of an image be sharp, if the grain is sharp?

My Canon flat bed scanner was hit and miss. I find the macro lens much more reliable, and AF is a dream.

I guess my point was that the AF system saw the grain. And once the grain was in focus, much like in the darkroom, that was as good as could be expected.

 

[monte12345]

Currently have everything put together with one small part I forgot to order. That is a 62-52mm step down ring so I can mount it to my 55mm f3.5 Micro Nikkor. I have everything put together with a 200mm nodal rail as the base with an added extension to hold a small Promaster LED light mounted to the extension. This will allow me to mount everything on my tripod and scan quickly by feeding slides or film thru the scanner. The big question for me is how to correct the color mask applied for the color negatives.

 

[Ken Seals]

Currently have everything put together with one small part I forgot to order. That is a 62-52mm step down ring so I can mount it to my 55mm f3.5 Micro Nikkor. I have everything put together with a 200mm nodal rail as the base with an added extension to hold a small Promaster LED light mounted to the extension. This will allow me to mount everything on my tripod and scan quickly by feeding slides or film thru the scanner. The big question for me is how to correct the color mask applied for the color negatives.

That's a great setup. Mine is very similar. I use Negative Lab Pro for color negative conversion.

The procedure is, in Lightroom Classic, use the white balance tool on the film plain border. I white balance the first one, then sync only the WB to the rest of the roll. Then send the images to Negative Lab Pro for conversion. You will notice that almost every roll of color negative has a unique orange tone, so do the white balance for each roll.

 

[Bernard Delley]

Currently have everything put together with one small part I forgot to order. That is a 62-52mm step down ring so I can mount it to my 55mm f3.5 Micro Nikkor. I have everything put together with a 200mm nodal rail as the base with an added extension to hold a small Promaster LED light mounted to the extension. This will allow me to mount everything on my tripod and scan quickly by feeding slides or film thru the scanner. The big question for me is how to correct the color mask applied for the color negatives.

since you have to invest more, consider this:

The Micro Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 is a fine lens. As a classic manual lens it is focused by changing the sensor-slide distance in the near 1:1 regime. it needs some sort of rail to do it.

A modern, now cheap internal focus lens like the AF-S 40mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor lens for DX crop mode (or the AF-S 60mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor for FX or DX) can autofocus with fixed sensor-slide distance. (it changes FL slightly)

The D850 is on of the few camera bodies that can do color negative reversion in camera. Big advantage when you quick prune imges on digitization: you can see the properly reversed image in LV.

 

[michaeladawson]

The plain fact is the 35mm film doesn't have the the resolution to support more than 6-24 mp depending on the film.

This is a 3 month old thread. And I'm sure the OP is long gone.

But I have to agree with you and others. There is absolutely no reason to use pixel shift in order to generate and deliver 180 MP files. Total and utter overkill for film. A standard 45 MP Nikon camera should be good enough. At least for 35mm and medium format film. I'm not sure about large format 4x5.

The OP seems to have a strongly held opinion that offering a 180 MP service would boost sales despite the fact that it would not deliver more resolution. If I had a friend that was going to use this 180 MP service I'd tell them it's a waste of time. If I came across a store advertising 180 MP film scans I would avoid them. To me, it would be a sign that they either didn't know what they were doing or deliberately selling something that isn't.

On top of that, for any volume type of business I don't see where you can afford to be processing pixel shift files.

Now... that being said, I could see somebody making a case for using pixel shift for generating a true RGB pixel for every pixel. I think it would do little to eliminate color moire as I'm not sure the randomness of film grain typically leads to color moire. But I haven't done a lot of scanning of fabrics with film to know that.

 

[Ken Seals]

The D850 is on of the few camera bodies that can do color negative reversion in camera. Big advantage when you quick prune imges on digitization: you can see the properly reversed image in LV.

I tried that on my D850 and did not like the results. The conversion file created in the camera is a fine jpg. I greatly prefer the results of a raw file converted by Negative Lab Pro. During the conversion process NLP can produce a .tif positive file that is much easier to work with in Lightroom Classic.

 

[Kaj E]

180 MP is overkill unless you are talking about large format 4x5 film.

Your Z8 files are good for mid format.

https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.1/

--
Kind regards
Kaj
http://www.pbase.com/kaj_e
WSSA member #13
It's about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.- Elliott Erwitt

 

[Blisqua]

Currently have everything put together with one small part I forgot to order. That is a 62-52mm step down ring so I can mount it to my 55mm f3.5 Micro Nikkor. I have everything put together with a 200mm nodal rail as the base with an added extension to hold a small Promaster LED light mounted to the extension. This will allow me to mount everything on my tripod and scan quickly by feeding slides or film thru the scanner. The big question for me is how to correct the color mask applied for the color negatives.

I use a speedlight set to manual, full or fractional power, with the Nikon ES-2 adapter so I can use a smaller aperture and don't have to worry about vibration, camera shake, or color temperature.

 

[monte12345]

I can also set it to operate in 16 bit color and output the conversion to 16 bit TIFF files. Have a 52-62mm stepdown ring coming tomorrow so I will finally have everything rapped up.

 

[monte12345]

Film used was Plus-X pan so their is grain present in the images. Would have liked to have used Panatomic-X but that wasn't available in sheet film.

Anyhow my scanner will scan at 6400 dpi so I though "why not". I learned "why not", that scan resulted in a 720mp image file. Which promptly caused ALL of my image editors to crash while trying to open this file. Then tried 3200 DPI and that resulted in a 200mp file but that was large enough the software was really slow to respond. BTW Corel Paintshop Pro does NOT use dedicated graphics cards and using the on mainboard graphics is like a boat anchor for very large files. End result taking into account the resolving power of Plus-X pan and the lenses used scanning at 2400 DPI was a sort of reasonable compromise. I'll also note that at that level of resolution clumps within the grain structure becomes quite visible and if you are a bit OCD it will take many hours of work "correcting this clumps". I would suggest anyone scanning 4x5 film consider doing those scans at 1600 DPI. Because realistically the Films and lenses used for 4x5 just don't have the resolution to support more than 1600 DPI. Funny thing about that, it works out to a touch more than 50mp which is within spitting range of 46mp isn't it?

 

[Alexander_A]

IMO the ES-1 adapter is actually better than the ES-2. (Metal versus plastic, can copy slides in thick plastic mounts, etc.) For scanning negatives I use the FH-1 film holder in conjunction with the ES-1.

Here's my digitizing setup. From left to right: ES-1 adapter, 62mm to 52mm step-down filter ring, AF-S Micro Nikkor 60mm f/2.8 lens, FTZ II adapter, Zf camera. (In my experience this older lens works better for slide copying than the Nikkor Z MC 50mm f/2.8, which I also have.) Shown below the camera is the FH-1 holder for unmounted film.