The Epson Scanner itself is not the problem. The problem is the Epson software which never got updated to 64-bit. Epson does have new software, Epsonscan, but I was told it works only on newer scanners, not my V500PHOTO. It also got simplified - they left out a lot of things from the old software, maybe because they didn’t want to rewrite all that with 64-bit code.
So, I’m sort of stuck - I can buy a newer Epson scanner, that comes with the newer software, but I think I’m better off sticking with what I have, and using any compatible computer, Windows or Mac.
Thanks - I will read up on the Digital Ice. From what you wrote, maybe I’m better off without it… As for the limitations of the scanner itself, I doubt I could afford a professional scanner. I’m not even sure how much scanning I will be doing in the future. Lots to think about…
I had the same problem until I discovered that “Epson Scan 2” existed. It took a bit of finding on the Epson site, but it is running fine on my M1 MacBook Pro under Big Sur. It’s not the same as the software that came with my scanner, but it does a decent job, particularly of finding multiple frames of negatives or slides.
I just went into the Epson support site to find it again. Confusingly it’s listed under drivers, not utilities.
I think what you found is the simplified version that leaves out a lot of things in the original. I had a choice of either “downgrade” to the new software, or continue using the full version on my un-updated 2013 iMac. Plan “B” was to use the scanner with my Windows laptop.
I guess either version of the software would work. The original also included “Digital Ice”, but from what Joanna wrote, I have questions about how good or bad it is. I need to read more about it, and see what kind of difference (good or bad) it makes for me.
Thanks for finding this. Now I’ve got a “plan C” if my old iMac dies.
I think that this paragraph is the key to almost all that is unclear right now. You, @mikemyers, want the best (=as good as it gets) and many guys here do (and I selected guys intentionally) without knowing what good or better or best means. There is no shame in wanting the best because we all are subject to loads of “get the best and be the best” through all our education, senses etc.
The first step on the road to “best” ist to find out, what “best” means. Is it a 20" by 30" print? Or looking at images on a 4k screen? Best cannot be something like “in a way to enable to see even more detail in 100 years”. We’ll never find out if we reached that last goal because we’ll all be dead by then.
Once we know what we really want (e.g. a 20x30 in print that we want to look at from 4 feet) we have the possibility to find out what tech we need, going backwards from the goal/end through all steps until we know where to begin in the first place - and completely miss items like story, composition, light, message etc. because of all the tech stuff.
Again, if @Joanna can create a print of the size she wants/needs with her D810, her D810 plus lens and appropriate settings are good enough, no matter what we think or write.
If we know where we want to go to, we can determine the “best” way. Or we can choose the broad road and see where it gets us - even to frustration.
I don’t think I’m at that stage yet. I have scanned a grand total of three negatives. Before I can realistically think about what I want to do, I need to get familiar with just “doing it”.
I think what I mean by “best” is to match the quality I can get from my Leica M10 with my 40-year-old lenses. I would like the equivalent of a full frame image from my Leica or Nikon, that is capable of making a 16 x 20 print that will look clear, and sharp, and properly processed. That’s the limit of what I have reached in all the previous years. I want to do this with my existing hardware - cameras, lenses, scanner, displays, etc.
So, my negatives will be shot on my Leica M3, or on my Nikon F4, in black and white, scanned on my Epson V500 at appropriate settings, and posted both here and on my web gallery. If the Ilford film I bought works, great. Hopefully I find a local lab to process it. Image editing will be done in PL4.
To be truthfully honest, if I can replicate what I’m capable of doing now, digitally, but using film, I think I will have reached an acceptable limit.
…but again, before I can even approach “the best”, I need to learn “the basics”. I sort of feel overwhelmed by all this, but unlike many other things, I think I can achieve this, over time.
You do realise that D880 is the designation for a new DSLR Nikon are planning on releasing this year? But I get your meaning.
Even if you can see the grain clearly, that doesn’t mean you will get any more detail in the image - that is down to the resolving power of the lens and there comes a point when the grain can get in the way of the detail.
As soon as you start to talk about scanning film, you start to lose the definition that film gives you. Traditionally (wet) printed negs look astounding because film has a continuous tone structure and doesn’t rely on the junction between one dark and one light pixel to make contrast obvious. Whether you take the original picture on a digital camera or scan a negative, you are still going to get this limitation.
One of the reasons I got into LF photography was because 35mm film simply can’t resolve the same amount of detail in an image that a sheet of 5" x 4" film can. Which is why, when professional film photographers want more detail, they choose a larger format. Which, in turn, means that they are faced with a choice…
take an array of digital images and then stitch them together
or
change to an LF film camera and get the shot on one sheet of film, which they then scan
The problem with multi-shot stitching is that the subject must not move between shots.
Either way, 35mm film is always going to be limited. It’s all well and good trying to be able to see the grain but, if the actual subject of the image is not distinct enough, you are never going to be able to do things like printing from a crop of the negative.
Hmmm. I much prefer Fuji film
It has been my experience that, in terms of detail in the image, not clarity of film grain, the D810 is good enough to cause me not to bother with my 6cm x 7cm MF camera most of the time.
Much more than the gentlest of crops of a 35mm neg is going to result in grain becoming more apparent so it would have to be something really worthwhile printing to warrant the loss of quality you would get with stronger cropping (unless you are willing to print at a smaller size)
2400 ppi (not dpi) should be fine as long as you don’t plan on anything drastic in the way of a crop.
… taken from the same scan of the sheet of film at 2400ppi
Don’t try this on 35mm
But if you do, here’s a crop from the image that equates roughly to a 36mm x 24mm area…
My guess is that these were darkroom prints, which are always going to be superior in detail (size for size) than a digital print of a digital scan of a film neg)
I have never used 35mm film since moving to LF. Then I sold my 35mm gear to help pay for my first digital camera - a Nikon D100.
This is so important. Don’t try and achieve a digital version of a film neg that you are never likely to need in the near future. By the time you want “more power”, scanning technology is likely to have moved on and you will be able to get better results anyway. Especially if all you want to do is show them on a computer screen. Don’t forget, with film, you can always archive the original without having to invest in multiple external disks and continuously have to make multiple overlapping backups (just in case).
I didn’t think of it before, but when I have been asked what I want from my photos, that provides the perfect answer - a cropped image viewed on a computer screen up to 27".
That is the way I expect most people to be viewing my photos, whether shot digitally, or scanned from negatives. As to grain, I will accept that, but I’ll try to use fine-grain film whenever possible.
I’m too old, and to un-wealthy to start up again with a large format camera, maybe Hasselblad, maybe view camera. That’s not likely to happen in this lifetime.
(I realize you need a lot more than that, for large prints, and while my own best prints would come from a photo lab, using the original negative, for my purposes I don’t see that happening. The largest prints I ever made were 16x20. Bigger than that, they always came from a lab, and this was either “for work”, or for “the hospital”.
P.S. - I forgot about the other benefits of shooting film. But even so, while we don’t have pixels on the camera sensor “pixelating” the captured image, we all view pictures with the equivalent of pixels in our eyes. I wonder how many “pixels” there are in the human eye…
I agree, but that’s like finding a hundred year old glass plate negative, or other formats that nowadays, we wouldn’t know what to do with. Even 20 year later - if you found an ancient 8" floppy disk in your attic, how would you ever recover data from it? Visit a museum? Sigh, at some point, all my 8" floppies got discarded, then my 5 1/4" floppies, and later yet, my 3" discs from my Macintosh. I still have “huge” hard disk drives, that now are so “small” and “slow” that they’ll probably get discarded.
Joanna - how many years will your prints last, before they start to fade?
If there was some kind of disaster or catastrophe, a few weeks from then, all our electronic gear will be useless. That’s another good reason to hold onto at least one old film camera, and some extra film…
Back to reality, and this thread, while my black&white images have remained in great shape, many of my ancient color prints (like those in the album my mom made for me) are fading away. When I think of my old film cameras, I’m usually thinking black&white, not color. 95% of MY old prints are b&w, not color - why, because I did the printing myself, and I only tried color once…
Two relevant quotes from the Leica forum, discussing scanning:
I scan my keepers at 3600 DPI using a Plustek 8100 and Silverfast. I turn off unsharp mask and adjust the histogram to get a relatively flat export. I then upload the export into LR and do my PP. I personally want files with lots of data that I can use in PP and then export at lower resolution for web.
…and this:
For black and white I photograph the negatives with my CL on a former slide duplicator. The lens on the duplicator is Schnieder Componon, designed for slide duplication, a very nice lens for the job. I like these results better than scanning, my Epson V700 maxes out at between 2400dpi and 3200dpi. It is best (sharpest) at 1800dpi, so with the CL I get a little larger file, DNGs do really well with Adobe ACR and PhotoShop. After having used Leicas since college, my M3 fit right into my hand, it was all muscle memory. I mostly use digital, but I enjoy taking out the M3. I did not have good luck with labs processing my b&w, so I set up at home, again all muscle memory, much nicer negatives…
My thoughts - I seriously thought about buying the minimal equipment needed to develop my negatives again. If I do this enough, it’s a real possibility…
Of course, one of the other advantages of digital v film is not having to deal with potentially toxic chemicals. When I think of some of the things I poured down the sink when dealing with b&w and color processing…
Hi Mike,
just don’t understand why you make life difficult.
Obviously, you are familiar with old gear & film and feel, this would solve your problem to process
pictures digitally, what you seem not to be very comfortable with. – Then you say, you (only) want to publish them in this forum and in your web gallery, but you are still facing ‘digital procedures’.
To make up your mind, use what YOU have, process your scanned historic 35mm negatives and publish them, to see how to get on and if you are satisfied with. Only THEN start thinking if it’s worth to take this route for new pics.
[And yes, I’ve been using SCSI and USB flatbed scanners before I got a dedicated Nikon 35mm film scanner 10+ years ago – to find out, it’s easier and better to copy historic stuff and important memories with my DSLR, using a copy station made with ArcaSwiss style parts.]
Around 2006, a good friend demonstrated, why he stopped working with Mamiya RB 67 (I used to have one) as he could enlarge his digital files (Canon 20D) to the same size without very noticeable difference. – The files from your Nikon DF are twice the size and from your Leica M10 and Nikon D750 three times bigger. That is more than enough for web use (if not to say overkill).
[BTW, why don’t you use Aperture priority with your old lenses? Stop down your lens to the preferred f-stop and your camera’s meter shows the very same value as in manual mode … free your mind. And if your old lenses don’t communicate well enough / you need a different focal range, look for modern ones.]
important note:
I’m not carrying you away from dreaming about print quality in xy size and mostly enjoy this discussion.
Just look forward instead to the past and get interesting pics – content matters.
1 - My main goal is to display images on a computer screen, but based on past experience the images may be cropped, and (especially in India) they may get printed. Based on what I think I’ve learned so far, all I need is a default value to set for resolution (ppi) when I scan images. I will first try 2400 as suggested, and see how well that works for me.
2 - Yes, I have my negative album open, and I will be scanning more of my old images, which will help me learn what to do, and how to do it.
3 - Life always is difficult. Everything. And even then, I make mistakes and correct for them as I learn more. A while later, I don’t remember why I used to think something was difficult - just like with PL4.
4 - I never thought of making my own copy station. Maybe in the future. For right now, I plan to use the Epson.
5 - What you suggest might be better, and I will start with existing negatives, but I think I need to start using film ASAP, and re-learn what is involved. (Consider GIGO, which I want to minimize. “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. I think there is far more that might go wrong in taking the photos, than in scanning.)
5 - Sure, I will post more images here.
6 - I am shooting in “Aperture Priority” mode with my old Leica lenses. With the M3, there is no more priority. The film I bought is ASA 100, and once I learn how to use the Sekonic meter again, it will give me a choice of maybe 8 or 10 combinations of aperture/shutter-speed. I will be back to doing what I used to do in the 1960’s. (None of my lenses communicate at all, and the camera does not have any metering built-in.)
I agree with Wolfgang about not making things difficult for yourself.
If in the future you want to go down another rabbit hole, there’s a whole community of people who scan negatives/slide with digital cameras. For color negatives, see https://www.negativelabpro.com/ (requires Lightroom subscription). But best to keep things simple and make one step at a time. For me, negatives and slides represent past data and memories but not the future.
You might consider this option a bit more. Your Nikon D750 will give you an affective resolution of virtually 4000ppi. I have used my D810 to “scan” 6cm x 7cm negs with excellent results. I used a spare tripod setup over an LCD lightbox and my 105mm macro lens. It takes time to get the framing dead square but, if you can leave it setup, and use a quick release adapter plate, you can use the camera for other things.
That is a superb idea. I can buy a photo stand from B&H. I think they sell a small “Lightbox” too, and the negative holders from my Epson V500photo will work just fine. I’ve got a good 105mm Sigma macro lens for my D750. I’ll try it first with a tripod as you suggest.
Brilliant! …and it was all sitting here in front of me all this time. Much better (and less expensive) than other options. I could even do it with my LeicaM10, which would let me view the scene on my computer display, live - but I will start with the D750.
But I get your meaning.
.