Quote:
Originally Posted by Eleven
Does anyone have experience with converting old black and white negatives and slides over to digital? I plan on using my old Canon XS. I have an older X-ray veiwer to back-light the negatives and I'm getting extension tubes in leiu of a macro lens. I'm hoping to just get decent shots of the negatives and process them in GIMP after. Most of these negatives and glass slides are from the 40's and 50's. My Granfather, his brothers and their father were all into photography, so I have thousands of individual pics to do.
My main concern is getting the right settings when taking pics of the negatives. Would it be better to shoot in monocrome, or color? What light balance would be best? I'm shooting in RAW for sure but starting out with the optimal settings would save me tons of time in the long run.
I've tried a few sample shots without the extension tubes so I'm sure I can get a better, closer shot the negatives later when they show up in the mail. My first tries were at f8, 1/125, 100ISO and auto white balance.
Here's a sample of my first try:
And after inverting the color and auto-balance in GIMP:
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I did a lot of this with film, once upon a time: Copy stand, light box (your X-Ray viewer), monochrome (In case it's not daylight balanced), be viciously clean to avoid specks and be aware that those old emulsions were pretty thick; meter it out. Baring that, a lot of labs provide negative scanning services.