 Yo, what up? Today we're going to be diving deep into the mysteries that surround my scanning and editing workflow for both 35mm and 120mm. And if after hearing that you were like, hell yeah, and then slapped your ass, then this is the video for you. Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Alright, well, it's that time once again. Time to light some candles, run a bath, put on some Marvin Gaye, and tell your significant other to take a hike, because it's your special alone time. It's time to scan and edit film. Here's the deal. I'm going to show you how I scan and edit my work. Personally, I use different techniques for every format that I shoot, like 35mm, 120mm, and 8x10 large format. I'm going to try and explain why I use different approaches, but it's going to get quite technical. I've separated this video into chapters as well, so if you'd like to skip a topic, you can jump around, just like the House of Pain always wanted. Anyway, you've gone out into the field, you've shot, and you've developed. So now you're ready to pixel-f**k your own work. So let's dive in. So, here's the download on film scanners. On every scanner, there's a technical DPI limit, and there's also something called an effective resolution. Effective resolution is the important one, because it's basically how much information your scanner can actually choke out of your film. A good example would be that your scanner can say that it scans a 10,000 DPI, but in reality, the true optical quality or effective resolution taps out at around 2400 DPI. What I'm basically trying to get at here is that anything scanned above the effective resolution on your scanner won't really arrest any new detail. So in this example, a 10,000 DPI scan will arrest the same amount of detail as a 2400 DPI scan. Are you still following along? I know this is a bunch of nerd s**t, but it'll actually help you understand why I use different techniques for different formats. This Epson V700 right here has an effective resolution of 2300 DPI, which might explain why a lot of people aren't very happy with the scans that they get out of it, especially for 35mm. Additionally, this Epson is not a dedicated film scanner, meaning this is a scanner that was designed to scan books, documents, ass cheeks, etc. and also conveniently has a film scan function. It's kind of like Taco Bell offering a new menu item, sushi. Yes, Taco Bell does make what some people would consider to be food, but would you really trust Taco Bell sushi to be the best sushi? I mean, you're probably gonna s**t your pants either way, so maybe not the best example. Because of all this, I do not use the Epson V700 for 35mm scans anymore. Instead, I use this PrimeFilm XA dedicated scanner, and if you do not know about it, you're sleeping on it. If 35mm is my bread and butter, then lather me up in butter and tape bread to my nipples because I'm all in on this thing. A high-end film scanner like the Nikon Super Cool Scan, side note, pretty cool name, can actually scan at an effective resolution of about 4000 DPI, which is pretty insane compared to the Epson at 2300 DPI. The downside is it's pretty expensive, and you won't be able to get a brand new one because Nikon discontinued that s**t a long time ago, because sometimes they're assholes. So here's why I use the XAS and why you're sleeping on it. The effective resolution on the scanner is somewhere around 4300 DPI, and you can get a brand new one of these for 500 clams. So, if you're a huge detail whore like me, and you just burned your house down for insurance money to cover all your film accessories, then this scanner is a goddamn steal. Here's a comparison of a scan on the Epson and the XAS at 100% and 5000 DPI with no sharpening settings. Pretty big difference in detail. But before you go out and buy the scanner, consider this. Unless you're printing, you're the only person who's going 100% in on your photos and examining every bit of detail. No one else gives a s**t. So that's something to mull over. So what's the catch? Well, this scanner only does 35mm, and dust can be somewhat of a problem sometimes. And if you shoot panoramic 35mm like the X-Pan, you'll have to figure out a workaround. For my X-Pan, I usually just scan as 2 halves, import into Lightroom, and make the auto-stitch function my b**ch. So that's it. That's my secret formula. I use this for all of my 35mm work. Here's some stills of all my settings and viewscan for you to copy if you want. Some important things to note here. I scan at 5000 DPI because that's close enough to the scanner's optical DPI at 4300. I scan as raw DNGs because that gives us a more flexible workflow that NegativeLab Pro craves. Lastly, I'd recommend not using the autofocus function at all. It mostly misses. I usually just leave manual focus on at a value of zero, and it's been mostly solid. Every machine's focus is different. I recommend you run some tests beforehand. For 120, it's time we move into the deep dark underworld of DSLR scanning. The size of 120 film is so massive that you'll want to try and capture every bit of detail that you possibly can. And I think that the only way you can really do that is through a DSLR scan or drum scan setup. I mean, let's face facts. DSLR scanning is the future. Not only for speed and the ever-evolving digital sensor technology, but for the sheer value that the entire setup is compartmentalized. If you want to upgrade your sensor or your optical quality in your macro lens, you can do those both individually. You don't have to buy a whole new scanner or ship the entire scanner out for repairs. And plus you get to utilize the ultra-powerful camera raw technology. It's all about raw. Dog. The way I achieve DSLR scanning 120 film is with a light table, a 120 film holder, a copy stand, a high megapixel digital camera, a 105 millimeter macro lens, and a can-do attitude. Let's dissect that setup a little bit starting with the negative supply 120 film holder. This thing is pretty great. It holds your film flat, it has a great roll-through function, and it's built well. It's harder than my abs after planking for 30 seconds and having to go to the ER. But it comes at a cost. Quite a hefty one that I'm not entirely convinced is worth the money. Especially for the fatal flaw that you need three shots on a strip to get the roll-through function to work properly. But most film page binders only fit two shots. The digital camera I use to scan is the Sony A7R II clocking in at 42 megapixels, which gives me an image of about 7952 by 5304. In the future, I think I'd like to upgrade to a camera that features pixel shifting. The Sony A7R IV looks promising. Macro lens. You'll need one of these to get your digital sensor close to the film plane. I use the Nikkor 105mm macro lens and it's quite good and not too pricey yet. In the interest of keeping things short and sweet, when I load my 120 holder, I position my camera and macro lens so that just about the entire frame is filled up with the film image. With the aperture on the lens open all the way, I use the focus assist and digital magnifier to make sure that I have the film plane in focus. Once I do, I set the aperture to f8 or f11, which are typically the sharpest apertures on most lenses. I try to use the fastest shutter speed I can and the lowest ISO I can. I'd say lower ISO is more important to lessen the amount of digital noise. Turn on the self-timer function on your camera to avoid camera shake. Then, literally, all you need to do at this point is just take a photo and make sure that you're using camera raw. Okay, most of you are probably not very interested in this, but I'll cover it real quick anyway. 8x10 sheet film is f***ing massive. It's so massive you might think I'm overcompensating for something. Getting all that detail captured into one image is no quick task. So for large format, I also use DSLR scanning. 8x10 film, I use the same materials that I use for scanning 120 film, but the technique is different. To capture the full magnitude of the sheet, I typically split 8x10 into 12 shots, or 4 rows for the longer side and 3 rows for the short side, if that makes sense. The idea is to take these 12 photos and have Lightroom auto-sit them together to create a massive image. Usually Lightroom has no problem doing this, and it's done in less than 30 seconds, which is incredible. It usually takes me longer to start peeing. There are a few key differences in the approach to scanning 8x10 sheet film though. For example, to get the film to lay flat, I use a huge piece of A&R glass that I lay on top of the film. Make sure the rough side of the glass faces the film. With your light-table on, slide your camera all the way out so that the whole image is in frame, and close your aperture to f11. Grab an auto-reading from the camera and remember those settings because it needs to be consistent across every frame. If you don't, you might have discrepancies in exposure between stitched frames. Now we can zoom in and set focus with the magnification tool on your camera, and your aperture set wide open. Once that's done, I set the aperture back to f11. I apply the aforementioned auto-ISO settings and fire away 12 sections of the image, making sure to have enough overlap between frames that Lightroom can identify what goes where when it stitches. In Lightroom, I simply auto-stitch the photos together using the panorama tool. Aw crap. Just make sure you have a substantial amount of memory and hard drive space if you're going to do this sh**. Once it's stitched, we're in a pretty good spot. We now have a huge resolution image, and best of all, it's in Camera Raw. Now we can finally die. I mean edit. It's worth mentioning that certain flatbed scanners like the Epson V700 can actually scan 8x10 sheet film by laying the film directly on the glass. But if you do that, you might soon realize that these mother f*****g start showing up. These are called Newton rings, and they were designed by Sir Isaac Newton because he was pissed off that he died a virgin. You can try and get around the Newton rings by laying a sheet of anti-Newton ring glass on top of the negative. But in my experience with flatbeds, it doesn't really kill all of them. So that's kind of just another bonus of DSLR scanning. No Newton rings from hell. So now the editing process. Finally, this is going to be the cherry on top of your ice cream sundae where all your blood, sweat, tears, piss, and diarrhea have gone to. If you're scanning an editing color negative film like we'll be doing in this video, there's technically no right way to flip your image. Every time a negative is inverted into a positive, what you're seeing is an interpretation. Whether it's the labs interpretation, the scanning software's interpretation, your own interpretation, etc. There's no absolute way to invert your image. So maybe it's time we kill this stigma of editing your film scans is a sin worse than masturbating in church. From this point on, I believe all of your edits should be entirely in service of your photographic vision. Where do you find your own photographic vision? Well, as the old saying goes, good artists steal, and great artists steal and don't get caught or something like that. Personally, my entire visual photographic style can be condensed into make it look like a painting. So I studied and continue to revisit a lot of my favorites so that they may inform my work. For example, some things that I'm going to look for in the edit, if I want to achieve a painterly look is vibrant colors, good image latitude, and a white balanced image. Alright, so here in Lightroom, we have our 35 millimeter and 120 shot. It's nearly the same workflow from this point on with one exception. Let's start with 35 millimeter for 35 millimeter because we're using the view scan raw DNG workflow. We first need to go to file, plug in extras, update view scan DNGs. Let's go into negative lab. I don't really spend too much time in here, but it's important to get a solid starting point for your image. I typically use the frontier color emulation. Inside the dialogue, I typically use highlights soft. For color temperature here at the bottom, this is important to get a good white balanced image. I usually flip between neutral auto warm Kodak and sinny tee, but realistically for my style, I want to choose the one that gives me the most color balanced image. Tick make a copy and apply. This is the copy that we're going to edit off of. I find that a lot of negative lab pro conversions lean heavily into the magenta look. In some cases, a few conversions of mine have actually been purplier than Grimace's Gooch. Whether that's a characteristic of most film stocks or not, that's something that we're going to want to correct if we want a solid white balanced image. I actually prefer to lean it a little more green anyway. I try not to do too much in the edit, but I usually bump the shadows a little bit and the exposure. Now down here in the curves area, I typically bow the highlights a bit as well as the shadows. I noticed that a lot of my favorite paintings don't really have a sharp black point, which is definitely a little more pleasing to the eye. A lot of higher end paintings resolve detail in the darkest parts of their composition, but then there's also some paintings that just use a solid color to muddy the shadows a little bit. That's not me calling the painter lazy, just lucky that it looks good. Additionally, I apply this effect because it kind of creates this hazy atmospheric feel in the brighter parts of the image, though you do sacrifice some detail. I typically leave the hue saturation and lightness alone because I want those beautiful portrait 400 pastel tones to sing. Okay, down here in split toning. This is your chance to add a little sex appeal to your shot if you'd like. I studied a lot of Edward Hopper's work and in it I noticed that a lot of the highlights of the image lean towards a slightly yellow cast. Whether that's aging paint, undertones, or whatever, I think the look is actually quite nice. It's kind of a two birds with one stone situation because I've noticed that some film stocks have a very slight blueish cast in the highlights anyway, so we're going to want to kill that. In most cases, the image will start to look a little bit off after that yellow adjustment. So to counterbalance the shadows, I use a split tone of 222 to the power of 4, or sometimes 8 if the image needs more zhuzh. Sharpening. Sharpening changes based on 35mm 120 and large format. For most shots, I usually crank that soldier boy. Lastly, I'll crop my 35mm frames to 4 by 3 because I think that it's slightly more pleasant to the eye than the full 35mm aspect ratio. I used to crop my 35 to 6 by 7, but people got violent in the comments over it. So what's the next step for your shots after you digitized them? How about arranging them in an online photography portfolio with today's sponsor Squarespace? 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So I'll quickly run through the 120 process here, not a whole hell of a lot different from 35mm you can probably imagine. Okay so rotate it... So as you might remember this shot was DSLR scanned, so what we're going to need to do is white balance to the film border here here. Now I'm going to go ahead and crop it in. Cool. Now let's go to file, plug in extras, negative lab pro, frontier, cool. Convert negative. Okay, that's looking pretty good. We have some very bright highlights here in the background. Let's go ahead and start by doing highlight soft and flip through our options here auto warm. I don't know. I kind of like the blue of the building and the orange chair. Kodak. Kodak doesn't look bad. I might stick with auto, auto average because the blues are quite nice. Let's go ahead and do make a copy and apply. Okay, so we have our edit here. First thing we're going to do is strain it out a little bit. Cool. Now it looks like I didn't f**k it up. So what I'm going to want to do is really bump these shadows a bit and the exposure. Maybe take the exposure down a little bit. Yeah, maybe take the highlights down on this one a little because we have this bright spot here. Yeah, that's not bad. So there's a lot of magenta in this image again. Let's go ahead and just lean it a little more green. Cool. So go down here and I'll use my fade. We don't want to go too far with it. There's basically no detail information out here anyway. So pinch this up a little bit. Leave hue saturation and luminance alone. Split toning. Let's go ahead and do the same thing. 69. Start with eight. Okay, that looks good. And I think the key to this photo is going to be adding a lot of cold to this shadow. So let's see. Sharpen. Let's just go ahead and get that up there. Cool. A lot of really nice detail in this photo. I mean, that Mamiya 7 lenses. The sharpest lens I've ever used for sure. So if we hit the backslash button, we can flip between our original and our edited version. Bump the exposure just a little bit. Make it nice and airy. Yeah, that's really nice. Whoops. I think now that I'm looking at this, I scanned this photo flipped horizontally. So we need to flip it back. Here's a little pro tip. I use this at work with compositing sometimes. If you've been staring at an image too long, you kind of like get in your own head about like what you think looks good. And a way to kind of like reset your view of whatever you're looking at, you can just do a photo flip horizontal and it'll kind of trick your brain into being like, oh, this is a new image. And so you can kind of look at it objectively and make whatever corrections you need to. Just don't forget to, you know, flip it back to its composition. So that's it. That's my complete workflow as it stands right now, right now being the keyword of that statement. It's changed quite a bit over the years and I expected to change even more in the future as digital sensor technology evolves. As much as it pains me to say this, I can't wait to see what digital cameras they come out with next because I'll be able to scan my film better. But feel free to let me know in the comments what you're scanning and editing workflow is. And if you have any ideas on how I might be able to improve mine. Anyway, this video is long enough, so like old Yeller, there's no sense in dragging out the end forever. I'll see you in two weeks.