I have a large collection of negatives and transparencies and some of them have not been viewed since they were taken.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It was always on the list of things to do to scan them and rediscover these images - or even discover them for the first time.
The first try at digitising film was with a Nikon Coolscan IV which gave a 12-megapixel digital image from either negative for slide and had software to remove fingerprint and dust and scratches.
The images were beautiful but it was slow, a strip of six negatives took more than 10 minutes. I also found that scratches showed up on a scan that did not show up on a print.
Then one day, while shooting a story for The Examiner in Latrobe, the gentleman I was photographing showed me a modification he had made to his slide projector.
He had diffused the globe and in place of the projector lens, mounted a camera with a macro lens pointing into the projector.
He loaded a carousel with 50 slides and with one hand clicked the camera, and with the other, clicked the projector remote to advance to the next slide. He could copy the entire carousel at the rate of about two seconds a slide.
This got me thinking and it wasn't long before I added a macro lens to the budget and the experimenting began.
First up I used a film holder from a scanner and a homemade cardboard box holder, with a flash illuminating a piece of paper at the back.
It was a good start but introduced me right away to the next problem - dirt and dust on the slides.
Some of the old Biggs slides from the 1950s were very dirty and dusty, it would take hours to digitally clean them and some of them were so dirty, digital cleaning was not an option.
I began breaking the slide mounts apart, cleaning the film carefully with film cleaner, and remounting them in new plastic mounts.
This was a process of more than five minutes an image and I lost interest straight away. It took a lot of experimenting before I settled on using a small soft paintbrush from Bunnings and a small blower. A gentle brush took the dirt off about 95 per cent of the slides in only a few seconds, and the film cleaner was reserved for only images with fingerprints or spots.
When it came to black and white negatives, I had instant success. The emulsion was resistant to dust and fingerprints and it was a simple matter of control I in Photoshop to get a positive that needed only minor tweaks of contrast.
Colour negatives were a different matter because of the colour cast in the film base. I found that the cleaner the negative, the better it transposed into a positive. Little spots of dust threw out the colour correction.
I spent ages trying to work out a good workflow but could not get consistent results, except for consistently bad. Sometimes the auto colour in Photoshop produced a great result, other times required fiddling with different channels in levels.
I eventually settled on software called Negative Lab which ran as a plugin for Lightroom and began getting consistently good results in a short time frame.
The worst trouble I have now is having to reinstall it when Lightroom updates.
The next step is to modify the setup to shoot 120 film.
The oldest negative I have is from my grandparent's wedding in 1924 and I have a lot of 120 Kodachrome landscapes that I'm keen to see again.
PHILLIP BIGGS, photographer