P: Scanning software

[Diederik Winchester]

Hi.

Like many others, I'm a photographer who has found passion and joy in film photography. From collecting vintage cameras, through taking ages to choose the right camera, lenses and film to shoot for an occasion, to eventually developing, scanning and editing my own rolls. It's a lovely way to slow daily life down, almost like meditation.

What I don't love about it, is the fact that there is ZERO reasonable consumer scanning software out there. Silverfast always finds a way to induce anger into an otherwise peaceful process by exporting an entirely different file than shown in its preview, Epson Scan is just horrible to work with and Vuescan... I don't even want to talk about Vuescan.

Wouldn't it be great if Adobe introduced Darkroom, an awesome alternative to all of the above? Software that could be used with consumer scanners like the ones from Plustek and Epson ánd of course for the DSLR-scanners alike, with the Lightroom functionality included (of course altered here and there to optimize the editing of specifically film photographs, for instance with an AI function for the removal of dust, scratches and maybe even excessive grain but also with frequently updated film recognition, to bring out the specific features of said film)?

This way, one can easily and comfortably get MORE out of their experience, instead of actually throwing all of the good vibes out of the window as soon as the scanning process begins.

With the resurgence and ever rising popularity of film photography and more and more professionals and hobbyists using analog as either a fun excercise on the side or even fully transfering to film photography, I'm hopeful Adobe Darkroom will one day exist.

I just wanted to throw this out there and hope that others will agree. For now, a film enthusiast can dream, right?

[Per Berntsen]

This is an interesting idea, but I don't know if it is something Adobe would prioritize.

Epson stopped making  their prosumer scanners this year, and Nikon stopped their scanner production several years ago.

And I think an increasing number of photographers are digitizing their negatives with digital cameras.

With a proper setup and a good macro lens, the quality will match the best film scanners.

I share some of your frustrations with scanning software – it's hard to get good results scanning color film with Vuescan, especially negatives.

EpsonScan is better, but only has a small preview.

I have used Silverfast a little, and found it to produce excellent colors from negatives, but you need the very expensive AI Studio version to be able to save 16-bit files.

I stopped doing analog photography several years ago, but have a large archive of negatives, and need to scan some of them from time to time.

For color negatives I now make raw scans (with no color correction) in VueScan, and convert them to positives using the Negative Lab Pro plugin for Lightroom Classic. It does an excellent job, and can also handle B&W negatives and color slides.

They have a free trial (full version), which lets you convert  up to 24 images.

[johnrellis]

Over the past 15 years I've scanned over 15K slides, a mix of Kodachrome and Ektachrome, with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 scanner and first with Nikon Scan and then Silverfast. I cataloged and edited them in LR.  I also scanned perhaps 500 Kodacolor negatives. The scanning and editing was tedious and fussy.

After putting this aside for a couple years, I picked up the project again.  But this time, I used a Sony a6500 with a decent macro lens and a slide adapter with LED backlighting and using Sony's free tethering app.  I'm much happier with the results -- the raw scans have so much more latitude for getting good Kodachrome scans. And even though the Coolscan had a batch loader, while I have to put the slides one by one into the slide adapter, scanning doesn't go appreciably slower, since I've got to brush each slide individually any way.

So I'm a much happier camper now that I don't have to use the Coolscan or Silverfast.

For scanning negatives and editing in LR, Negative Lab Pro has had a lot of good reports in the forums. (I haven't used it myself.)