Unfortunate Film Scan Trials

Painful lessons in shopping around film scans.

Shoppers Drug Mart
To my surprise they aren’t the absolute worst around. I downsized a few of my own digital photos to the resolution they give, 1024x1544, and it actually took JPEG Quality 10 to get a comparable size to what they gave me (1.0-1.6mb) So I’m estimating they are compressed with Quality level 8 or 10. Photos are slightly cropped. Colour adjustments aren’t applied which I’m currently neutral to because I would prefer to keep the ambience of a low light picture AND have it corrected a little. Scratches and spots on many negatives. Still…not terrible and useful files for small edits. Cheapest around at $3 for processing and scanning to CD and same day turn-around.

Crap
Walcrap
Walmart
Varies by location and competence of the operator. The location I went to at Square One Mall is the absolute worst as far as I am concerned. I receive 1024x1544 files at 150-200kb each which are useless for editing since they’re full of JPEG compression blocks and detail is obliterated – nothing to sharpen. Downsizing my own pictures I find the quality must be reduced to level 3 to be comparable *shudder*. Slightly cropped, no colour correction as the above also. Scratches and spots on many negatives.

Refunded.

Black’s Photography

Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to email us.

The store will try there best to have these scanned at 300DPI. I hope this information helps if you have any further inquires feel free to ask.

Uh oh? If printers print at 300 dots-per-inch (DPI) and a negative 24x36mm (1x1.4”) is scanned at 300 DPI that means I can make a physical print of 1x1.4”! Wow ok, they’re obviously thinking something different, the “you need 300 DPI to make a good quality print” rule. Anyway, I go to the Square One Mall location and their literature states 1232x1840 which – at the time – sounds marginally better than the previous places so I have them give me scans back.

Left Walmart, Right Black’s

Black’s has obviously corrected it better, but at the expense of washing out the ambience. So it looks like one extreme or the other. What bothers me most is that their scanners are setup to crop a little off every side! The 1232x1840 resolution is really just a gimmick to make them look better and in fact are upscaling (interpolating what a larger size would look like) to fit the familiar 4x6” size properly when printed. I could have used those pixels below the ice cream cone! What you’re getting is still a 1024x1544 file to put it simply and JPEG at Quality level 8.

Photo Depot
At 348 Lakeshore Road East. $10 for processing and high resolution scanning (16-base, 2240x3360). Files are at JPEG Quality level 10 and range from 2-4mb depending on content (like complexity and grain). Definitely the best looking photos I got back so far. Well corrected; not yellowed or ambience blown out on any. I tagged them with Fuji Reala so you can view them here for examples and anything I’ve posted up to August 15, 2009 has been processed there. Turn-around is for next day. I don’t think they’re cropped, but have no reference to verify. I’ll just be happy :P

Photobuddy

My photobuddy Annie is so resilient. She’ll visit places at unheard of times, choose themes and lie on the QEW at 4am waiting for the right light to pass by (a semi-truck). Anywho, we’re both perfectionists in our own ways. She does wicked portraiture effortlessly in seconds and has a great eye for what adds to and detracts from a great photo (fat legs, awkward craning necks, squinting eyes, any visible tension). I’m more of an exposure freak because, as I know how cameras work, they can’t intelligently determine the tonality of an object (how dark or how light a colour is supposed to be).
I’m a total newbie at shooting people so having a friend like her shows me how different…ly…skilled you have to be!

Some random shots:

Some sort of split-toning I made to evoke the ice cream (brown) and sun on her hair (dark maroon? lol)

Left to Right: Borked up double exposure, Polaroid 669 colour simulation with cyan shadow cast, last one I love the reflected light hitting the ladder and her hand really draws you in because it’s at the same focal point as the ladder

First Photo

And since the First Photo I’ve had more not-bad photos and have learnt a thing or two about controlling exposure on this very automatic camera.

I love this! It was the only photo, and the first one, that I was unquestionably happy with – made my day! Exposure looks fine and distance on the focus zones looks ok (1m chosen), just slight blur from her motion. Only adjustment was adding 12% Blue in Photo Filter to counteract the Orange-ish cast it had (blue is the opposite of orange!). At first she commented on the little array around the lens and I explained it’s actually for receiving solar power which is quite insane given it was made three decades ago and there’s nothing around like it today. It looks more familiar as one of those gigantic round saucer lights the dentist shines in your mouth. Wow, never expected the camera itself would start conversation! She seemed cute chatty enough so I asked for my first photo, wahoo! Asking is soooo important; I have a huge problem with any sort of special attachment to something you took from 8km away.

Now for the two not-bad photos from the first roll:

  
Not sure if this is too orange. It was a combination of sunset light and the orange skid. Pretty much all film pics have a colour cast unless you correct them. This was too magenta originally so I added 10% Green in Photo Filter.

The two deflated tires in the rear makes for a great angle, but the background isn’t too appealing.

 
And the obligatory measure-your-lens-distortion-phallic-size brick wall shot which miraculously does look pretty damn straight like a grid! The only error is my perspective not being exactly parallel. Very reassuring for when photographing buildings and things that should be straight.

Changing Tools

Using disposables for a month wasn’t just a gimmick; hopefully I’ve convinced you of that. I emphasized them for their speed, bright viewfinder, and non-intimidating nature. I initially picked them up because I felt a photographer’s block. I aspired more to be ‘shooting what I see’ and less fuss over exposure and all the technical that comes before taking the photograph. Trust me, I know my way around manual and spot metering tones, hyperfocal (not that it applies to point & shoots much) and using a grey card if I had to, but it also dictates very much what your style is. I feel I’ve always had the most success just taking photos through intuition – meaning not being aware of a situation or circumstance, but knowing there’s something special there. This instantaneous nature of photography is not something I had tapped into very often. Using disposables has changed my seeing in a beneficiary way where I know I have a different tool, but the right tool for a different type of photography. Inevitably this means I want more of the same, but in a proper film body and a lens not made out of floor tiles…

Doing on and off research and with a strong siding with a Flickr buddy, I bought an Olympus Trip 35 for $40 CAD on eBay. Not fully manual – no I don’t want that fidgeting to bring me to my heels for now. Highlights:

- Solar powered light meter (no batteries!)
- Zuiko 40mm F/2.8; insanely sharp, almost no distortion
- Four indicators for focus: 1m, 1.5m, 3m, infinity
- Thumb wheel allows you to advance film with one hand
- Parallax error markings in viewfinder

All I can think of at the moment!

The solar powered meter around the lens definitely draws attention and was an unexpected way to strike conversation with people. Actually while I was getting a coffee at a Starbucks in The Path today one of the Baristas asked me about it cause it’s obviously too cool and unusual! More on that later.

A Simple Film Workflow (for disposable cameras)

I don’t claim to be an editing expert, however a lot of what you can do to a photo depends on the file you start with. Shoppers Drug Mart are the cheapest around – they’ll scan a roll to digital files for $2.99. What you get are 1544x1024 files good enough for the web. If you’re serious about printing them or need files with more bit-depth, uncompressed, etc I’d take them to Toronto Image Works where you can get gigantic files from your negatives.

I’ve been applying the same ‘capture sharpening’ principle everyone does when they start with their digital RAW files. Fixing colour casts can be done through Auto Colour which gets it in the ballpark and using Photo Filter afterwards to make a more precise correction if there’s still issues. People generally recommend to blur noise instead of trying to remove it which inevitably blurs detail; one of the better methods is to Despeckle the blue channel where noise prominently lies. There’s a slightly deeper method involving changing to LAB colour space, however I don’t believe it’s worth the destructive process of changing spaces when dealing with 8-bit files.

1. Despeckle the Blue channel
2. Spot Heal any obvious dust spots
3. Try Auto Colour to see how close it will fix colour casts and follow with Photo Filter if you can still detect a problem
4. Use Unsharp Mask (designed for film) and read this page. You just want to apply enough sharpen effect to lift the initial softness of the photo
5. Downsize to something like 800 or 1024 pixels on the long side. Small so they are useless in print, plus I feel the small size retains that mystery of what the viewer saw without needing to inspect every pixel
6. Use Smart Sharpen and Gaussian Blur option with a much lower amount percentage and radius. Gaussian Blur is used for soft or slightly out-of-focus photos (like the disposables)

    

 

I wouldn’t go overboard on tonal corrections with these files. The major eyesores are in the shadows. An easy way to fix them is by plotting points of interest using curves and moving the anchors with your arrow keys as to not make such drastic changes. Still…the photos need more work which has more to do with the limitations of the camera used. Some time in the immediate future I’m planning on getting an Olympus Trip 35, that way I shouldn’t have to deal with vignetting (as much) and obvious optical distortions or blurriness.