USING A FLATBED SCANN E
USING A FILM SCANNER
1 Flatbed scanner
Most good fl atbed scanners, more often used
for scanning fl at artwork or photos, can be
equipped with a fi lm scanning hood or lid
that will scan negatives or transparencies of
different sizes. This an old but still serviceable
Epson Perfection 4490 scanner with its
dedicated hood connected.1 Budget vs high price
Film scanners come at different prices. The
more you pay, the better the results. Here’s a
budget-priced Digitnow that’s powered from
the USB port to record images onto an SD card.Keep it simple
The simplest method is to put the
negative or transparency on a lightbox
and photograph it with a digital camera
equipped with a macro lens that allows
1:1 magnifi cation. Old-time traditional
lightboxes that contained fl uorescent
tubes in big metal boxes with ground-
glass or plastic screens on top are a bit
thin on the ground these days. But a
quick search of Amazon or the like will
reveal inexpensive artists’ light pads
intended for tracing and stencilling, or
one of those miniature cinema billboards
made for displaying illuminated ‘Happy
Birthday’ type messages. You can
even use your iPad or similar tablet by
downloading a free app such as Lightbox
Trace, which opens as a totally blank
white screen.
This quick and dirty method can be
more eff ective than you might suppose. It
works for monochrome negatives – whose
images are easily inverted to positives in
your usual image-processing software –
and for transparencies – which are
positive images to start with. It isn’t good
for colour negatives for one good reason.A monochrome negative yields images
where dark becomes light, light becomes
dark, black is rendered white and white is
rendered black. A colour negative renders
dark and light areas in similar ways,
while colours are reversed into their
complementary hues: red becomes cyan,
green becomes magenta and blue becomes
yellow. But it’s not as simple as that. If
it were, you could simply copy a colour
negative and digitally invert the image.
The problem is that, in order to improve
colour reproduction – and for reasons a bit
too complicated to go into detail here – an
overall dull orange tint is added to colour
negative fi lm. So when you invert the
image, it contains a strong blue cast. You
can adjust and largely eradicate the cast
with image-processing software, but it’s
fi ddly and time consuming. A better bet
when digitising colour negatives is to useA 20-year-old
medium-format
transparency
scanned on a
flatbed scannerHow an iPad or similar
tablet can be used to
photograph a transparency,
using a digital camera with
close-focusing capabilities