Anton Chia's photostream

Strobist Info: 24" Philips LCD monitor with Windows 7 stock blue background on screen, lighting the scene camera front (into the camera), freelensing and light leaking onto the sensor.

ISO400 f/1.2 at 1/60sec.

100% crop of DSLR "Scan", cropped at right side sprockets, grain pattern visible.

elf 'scan' with DSLR - said to have better result than flatbed scans and for free if you already own a DSLR with macro lens. But not as good as the dedicated film scanners. And time consuming with adjusting colors, was hard to get it close what I got from the Frontier or Noritsu machines. And it leaves me wondering, what are the real colors of film stock?

1) Z-96 LED light panel, (video light).
2) Piece of white printing paper.
3) Use the diffuser panel that comes with the Z-96 light, place it over the paper, it will snap into place with its magnet. This makes it like a negative viewing light box.
4) I really need a smooth surface to avoid texturing the image, since the negative is transparent, obviously. I will find a way if I got time in future.
5) Lay negative on top.
6) Try to make it flat, ie; weight it down by the sides.
7) D700 with 105mm Macro lens.
8) ISO200, f/8, 1/60sec.
9) Try shooting as straight down as possible, to minimize distortion.
10) Photograph the negative. Yeah with the sprockets too to be cool.
11) Beauty of this is that you have control here, if your negative is too dense, you have option to 'develop' for the highlights by exposing digitally for it, and ignore the blacks and let it clip. In other words you can compensate based on your judgement instead of letting a scanner control.
12) Download the file photo editor.
13) RAW file processing and cropping in Lightroom 3.
14) Export to Photoshop as 16 bit TIFF.
15) Invert the file from Negative to Positive.
16) Colors will be way way off and out.
17) Curves control to balance and adjust color back to normal and remove any tint, you may need several layers of adjustments.
18) Adjust tonality, bring back your highlights, correct contrast, whatever.
19) Save the file and go back to Lightroom 3.
20) Export the file.
21) If you are still with me, congrats.

Original photo shot using Nikon F5 film camera with 85mm f/1.8 AF lens on Fuji 800 NPZ professional film. Digitized by Nikon D700 digital camera with 105mm f/2.8 macro lens.