I already own a DSLR (a present for a significant birthday) so I saw no harm in trying it. I think it was when googling the issue with scanning Kodachrome shadows that I found some articles about using a DSLR to digitise slides. On a more positive note I discovered Darktable during my second attempt to improve the scanner output and I have not regretted that discovery at all. Maybe there are scanners out there that can cope better with Kodachrome but I don’t intend to spend more money in that direction. So for me the film scanner has been an expensive learning experience. As I understand it this experience is not unique to me - the dark parts of Kodachrome are very dense but that does not mean that they don’t contain detail. My conclusion about the scanner was that it just wasn’t able to cope with the density of the dark parts of Kodachrome slides and no amount of calibration or post processing was going to fix that. I had a second try in 2018 and spent more time adjusting the exposure settings but it made very little difference - the scans got brighter but also more noisy. Admittedly some were underexposed but some just had a lot of dynamic range. Stretching the dark areas in post processing quickly produced a nasty reddish purplish ‘mud’ of noise. It wasn’t.Īfter 106 scans I concluded that I just wasn’t getting the shadow detail from many of my slides. I thought it was going to be ‘the answer’. My experience is that in 2013 I had my wife spend what is for us a considerable sum of money on a dedicated film scanner (with bundled Lasersoft) for my birthday. I guess we are all a product of our experiences. They have most if not all color profiles for film emulsions and scanners, and support multi-exposure HDR scan along with infra-red dust removal. I bought PacificImage Electronics many years ago, along with SilverFast SE Plus 9 :: LaserSoft Imaging. Set your camera’s white balance to the light source for a baseline, and make adjustments based on the individual slide. Instead I’ll use my own judgement, and a well-calibrated monitor, to get the image looking good to my eye. I don’t need an IT-8 target so I can get an exact match for a flawed slide. Was the slide taken in open shade resulting in an ugly blue cast? Then I’ll adjust the color temperature in RawTherapee. Was the slide underexposed? Then I’ll increase the exposure time when digitizing. These days, with DSLR or mirrorless scanning, my goal is not to exactly match a flawed original, but to make the necessary corrections to improve it. Then, when the client complained about a scan having a slight color cast, the service bureau would point out that the original film also had that color cast, and they did their job by making a good match to the flawed original. Back in the day when most scanning was done by service bureaus charging hundreds of dollars per drum scan, the goal was to match the original transparency as closely as possible.
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