Scanning Your Own Horizon - Part Two

Another weekend has passed and more old images have come to light - but this time they have happy scenes instead of sad ones. Because I have finally told myself the truth. The truth is you cannot cut corners and end up with anything looking sharp. Rephotographing negatives is certainly possible, but carries a range of possible errors that you may not recognise at the time. And reprocessing them compounds the misery. The first error can come from the light source behind the slide or neg. Granted you can take a custom white balance from nearly any light source, but some lights change their output over time and you may never know it. As well, some light sources that look even to the human eye are far less so under a good digital sensor. You'll also need to look out for dust or patterns under the film close to the plane of focus. The second error is geometrical - you need to get the plane of the camera and its sensor parallel to the negative you are copying and it may move out of whack during your work. If you need to remove the camera to discharge the memory card or files - or renew the battery - you risk it never going back the same way twice. Third problem? Well the colour negative's orange mask is a right misery to adjust away - you can take spot white balances to try to eliminate it, but you are still mostly on the dirty end when you finally flip the tones. This might be resolved with a commercial plug-in but you'll be paying to find that out. The answer? I looked at the re-photographed results, shuddered, and put them aside. Then I took out the same negatives, made sure they were dusted off, and put them into a cleaned-off Epson V-series scanner. I worked for two days redoing the images and comparing them to the re-photographed ones. When I was satisfied that the results were finally correct, and clean, and good - I trashed the bad ones. There were rituals and hazards with flat-bed scanning - I'll cover them in the next post - but the time spent was not wasted. I could not recover the first weekend's time, but I could finally look on a job well done. Note for heading image - Left scanned, and right rephotographed. Truth and lie.