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Some Tips On Scanning FIlm Into Aperture
This past week I have been trying to get myself up to speed with a few of the scanners we have available to us on campus. We have a good variety of scanners in our studio center, as well as a couple higher end models upstairs in the Grad Research Lab. I decided to try out two scanners and see if I could come up with a decent workflow.
The computers in our labs don’t have Aperture installed, but I normally bring my laptop and a portable hard drive along with me to the lab. So, the basic setup is that I use the scanning station, save my work to disk and then transfer it to my laptop for import into Aperture. I am sure there is a much better way to do this, and of course I could set up a fancy Automator workflow, but for this initial testing phase, I decided to keep things simple.
The two scanners I tried out were the Nikon 9000 film scanner and an older Epson 4880. The Epson is a flatbed that can handle film as well. I started out with the Nikon as I was curious to see how long it would take to set things up and actually perform the scan. Well, it took some time. I was scanning 120 film and with the Nikon you have to re-preview each time as you position the scanner offset so it matches up with your frame. To make things even more complex the images on this film were show with a Holga, so things were all over the place.
On one hand the Nikon scanner makes an amazing file. It takes a good deal of time to set up, and a pretty long wait while it scans and writes the file at full resolution, but if you are using the image for a large print, it is well worth it. I am sure I will be revisiting this scanner in the weeks to come.
To get things going a little faster I decided to try out the Epson flatbed. The Epson comes with a set of film holders that you can use to correctly position your film on the bed. These also keep the film slightly suspended off the bed and in the right position for sharp focus. The issue I had with the holder however was that for 120 film and Holga images it was a good deal of work just getting the film in the right spot.
So, I tried my luck at just laying the film on the bed. The trick to doing this is that you have to sort of know where the limits of the film scan bed are. These are somewhat smaller than the actual bed which is designed to scan an 8.5X11” sheet of paper. However, this is one of the quickest ways to make a medium quality scan. You can scan the entire bed of images and then use Photoshop to cut them up into individual pictures.
I ended up doing this for a couple rolls of film. The results were medium to fair quality. In some cases you could see the effects of the film touching the bed and the overall sharpness was not as good as I could have done. I am sort of looking for the perfect balance between quality and speed.
Back on my laptop I imported the images into Aperture. I created a new Project and made separate albums for each roll. I made sure to add as much metadata as I could remember from the shoot and I organized the images by frame number so I could see the progression of my shoot in the correct sequence.
One little trick that I had to do after importing these images was to adjust the image time and date stamp to when the photos were actually taken. This is a new feature in Aperture 2.0 and very welcomed. You have the choice to apply the change to the master files or just to the metadata, and you can either apply the same date and time to a batch of images, or you can change them one by one.
To get at the correct date and time I looked at the metadata from a photo I shot with my iPhone at the same time. My little iPhone has become an incredible note taking tool, and now that it records GPD information, I can recall exactly where the shots took place!
I have this dream of digitizing my entire collection of images and organizing them in Aperture. Once I come up with a system that sort of optimizes speed and quality of the scanning process I am going to see how far I can get. If you have any tips or tricks you would like to share regarding scanning and Aperture please let me know in the comments. I would love to hear your thoughts.
I look forward to more of you scanning experience. I am trying to do the same myself lately. I have a entry level Epson 4490. It in general does a decent job. But it is extremely hard to keep those really curly film strips in place. And the scan quality goes down dramatically on slides. I suspect it is a focusing issue.
I am saving for a Nikon CoolScan V.
Hi,
I have the Epson Perfection V350 Photo since about 3 years or so, I've had good experience with the autoloader (4 frames per scan). The quality is good enough for me - but I'm not a professional.
It can scan Diapositives and film strips, I have yet to add them to my Aperture library - but I'm still organizing, as I don't want to scan in >10000 Diapositives, as they only go one by one.
Hiya,
I have been using a 9000 with Aperture too and I keep getting a "Format not supported" error from aperture when it loads the full image. The preview is fine.
I get the feeling that it is a memory management problem as it is generally after viewing a series of 120 images in TIFFs. If I restart Aperture the same images will be fine - for a while. I'm doing the scans at 4000dpi 16bit so the files are pretty big ~400MB I think.
Anyone else seen or fixed this problem.
Dave.
Hi friends, I use an old Nikon LS-2000 that works fine with an adapter scsi-firewire and with the great scan software Vuescan from hamrick.com.
The only trouble is that the DNG generated by Vuescan is not compatible with Aperture and when I asked to Hamrick and they said that the problem is due to Apple that do not use the rigth DNG code. So, just for the RAW files generated by Vuescan, I have to pass from ACR, make the raw work there, export a psd file and then import the psd into Aperture. Is it true that there is not any way to import those Vuescan's DNG directly into Aperture? Thanx.
Mauro
I’ve just finished scanning all my old print and slide films. As an amateur/hobbyist photographer many of my old pictures are of family & friends – not masterpieces - so I wasn’t too bothered about absolute quality.
I’ve been using a Konica-Minolta Scan Dual IV and Hamrick Vuescan with my MacBook Pro laptop. Vuescan is pretty good at automating much of the work, far better (in my opinion) than Konica Minolta’s software and its default settings are a great starting point.
In total, I’ve scanned about 14,000 frames and it’s taken three years. How? Well, early on I decided the best approach was to chip away at the mountain of film bit by bit. I set up the scanner at the side of my favourite armchair and resolved to scan one roll of film per evening. So, while watching television or reading or generally surfing the net or… I would scan film. I'd put a strip of film in, get on with something else while the scanner did its stuff, then swap the film strip for the next one when the scanner made the ‘eject’ noise.
I scanned to JPEG (95% quality) setting an approximate capture date. I stored the scans on my local hard drive using a file name of C999F99 – C for Colour film, 999 a sequential number for the role of film, F99 for the frame number. About once a week I’d critically examine the scans, move them to where I really wanted them, Aperture them, fine tune the date, etc. This also meant I got a Time Machine backup of every scan.
Until very recently Vuescan did not add EXIF data to the file so I was using SetEXIFData (http://marc.vos.net/). SetEXIFData is more flexible than Aperture or Vuescan in allowing you to set the time interval between frames when it is used in batch mode, so I still see a role for it in the workflow.
What have I learned from all this?
1. Get yourself organised before you start, then just get on with it little-by-little.
2. Get your head around EXIF and how Aperture handles dates – my second biggest regret is not doing so right at the start. Aperture can cope with files lacking EXIF data, but I strongly recommend adding EXIF before importing into Aperture.
3. Pay the extra and buy a scanner that has infra-red dust reduction. Dust is a major problem even if you think your negatives are perfect – my number 1 biggest regret. You can always sell it when you’ve finished scanning all your photos.
4. The quality from 25-year-old 35mm film stock is poor compared to modern dSLRs. Don’t worry too much about the quality of your scans – JPEG is plenty good enough in most cases.
5. Colour negative film gives better scans than colour slides. This seems odd, but many people have found the same.
6. After scanning a roll of film mark it clearly so that you can find it easily in case you wish to re-scan a frame later as a better quality TIFF.
7. Vuescan (www.hamrick.com) is a very sound investment.
8. The satisfaction of having ALL my life's photography in Aperture is well worth all the effort!
If you would like to know more, drop me an email – photos@Anaxagoras.co.uk
Thanks Anaxagoras.
I have exactly been under the same situation like yours, except that I could not have put it in such a detailed and clear words.
For the past 3 years, I have done over 15,000 scans of all my slides (38 years of hobby) and I have just now started doing my negative strips.
I have a Nikon V5000E that has been working like a charm with the slide feeder taking up to 40 to 50 slides at a time.
Although it froze from time to time, I managed to have some reliable processing done.
Now the negatives session is going to take much longer with 4 or 6 frames per strip.
Unfortunately, I did not know about EXIF before and Aperture 1 was not as easy as version 2 to change the datas.
I wish I had read your report 3 years ago as I would definitely have made a lot of things a different way. Too late and I have to work harder to sort them out.
It takes an awful time to do this work, but as you rightly mention it is such a great satisfaction to have them all on Aperture, saved for our family future generations. (Will they find time to go through them?).
Thanks again for your brilliant input.
Frédéric
I just got my new Nikon SuperCoolScan 5000ED, and I am looking forward to scanning my old 35mm film library and archiving in Aperture. I am planning to use 16bit TIFF because scanner RAW is not typically supported by Apple or anyone else. Scanner RAW is different than DSLR RAW.
My wife picked me up a book on scanning film, and I have found it excellent. I have read completely while waiting for the scanner to come in, and I highly recommend it.
It is called "Scanning Negatives and Slides", by Sascha Steinhoff, c2007 by Rooky Nook Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, 93101. ISBN 13:1-978-933952-01-7.
http://www.amazon.com/Scanning-Negatives-Slides-Digitizing-Photographic/dp/1933952016
I keep getting the "Unsupported Image Format" as well..I have Drum Scans of 4 x 5 Chromes that are 800mb + and about 13,500 x 10,500 pixels. The problem seems to be with images over 10,000 pixel dimension. All of my large Panoramas have the same trouble. I am a Pro Photographer and have the need for these Huge files to print Huge Banner graphics that are often viewed close. This bug is a major flaw as just about any 4 x 5 Drum scan for large print projects/Fine art will exceed the abilities of Aperture to display and edit them......anyone have a fix ? (Other than making the images smaller lol)
I'm having the same problem with scans from a 5000ED. And, to make things worse, it always crashes Aperture if I try to import a whole directory of scans at one time. My scans are of 6X6 transparencies, scanned at 16-bit/pixel and 4000 DPI, resulting in scan files of about 500MB each.
Researching the web, I found several people discussing this problem but no comments from Apple regarding a possible fix. Speculation is that it will be fixed when Apple converts Aperture to a 64-bit application to better take advantage of "Snow Leopard."