Scanning Negatives and Slides by Sascha Steinhoff: Review

There are only a handful of relatively recent books on scanning film. Steinhoff's book is a welcome addition to this group.

The Bottom Line

This book is a good introduction to film scanning technologies and techniques.

The rating: 3 Stars

Summary: There is a lot of good material here. However, the stress placed on high-end techniques makes much of this material unhelpful for many people, and is potentially confusing and misleading.

Detailed Review

The essential goal of this publication is to educate the photographer who has a film archive (including negatives and slides) on the processes of converting that analog archive to a digital form. Steinhoff describes technologies, methodologies, and best practices to facilitate the transfer of analog photographic media to digital data utilizing scanners. He offers suggestions on how to create a digital workflow that is repeatable, reliable, and efficient. The book is laid out in fifteen chapters and includes a DVD containing sample scans from film and flat bed scanners and sample scanning and editing software.

This book is published by Rocky Nook; it is well printed on nice paper (though this book doesn't include the lay-flat binding system present in some other publications from Rock Nook). Every book from this publisher is a treat compared to some of the lower cost printing that we have seen.

Overall, this book is well-done. There is a great deal of useful information here for someone new to the scanning field. Our primary concern is that less technically proficient readers may be led to believe that they need to tackle many of the most expensive, cumbersome, and stickiest issues in digital imaging to achieve good results. For example, many pages of the book are dedicated to discussions of RAW image formats, add on scanner accessories for improving light sources, and color management. In truth, these issues, though important, are not at the heart of the problems and solutions faced by most people who may be interested in converting archives of slides or negatives to digital form. Rather, the average person is interested in straight-forward, inexpensive ways of realizing their high-level goal.

The fifteen chapters are organized in the following manner:

• Chapter 1: "Preface" compares various working methods available to photographers, from analog film capture, the hybrid workflow, and straight all digital methodologies. The author goes into great depth by describing the analog workflow for negative film and slide film, then moves into what he describes as the hybrid workflow (shooting analog, scanning, digital processing), then describes the all digital workflow. Finally, he offers an overview of print and film scanning as well as alternatives to film scanning. Chapter one is full of great information for the beginner and even a few topics that the intermediate or advanced technician could find useful, such as special handling and processing for Kodachrome materials and duplication of slides with a digital SLR camera. There are a variety of observations in this chapter that are worth studying.
  
  First, Steinhoff's analysis of the differences in resolutions between digital SLRs, Film Scanners and 35mm films is interesting and matches well with what we observe everyday in scanning 35mm slides and negatives to DVD. Scanning film can produces wonderful images, but it is very difficult to compare with images from a DSLR because there are fundamental difference which are apparent very quickly due to grain. Our observations on resolutions needed to capture information from normal, consumer grade 35mm film matches Steinhoff's observations: the highest scanning resolutions are rarely needed to capture all detail on the film.
  
  Second, the author compares scans from flatbed scanners with scans from dedicated film scanners. Again, his results match our observations on the relative quality of flatbed scanners. Scanning with a flatbed scanner clearly does not provide the same quality as a decent film scanner.
  
  Next, Steinhoff analyzes the value of scanning negatives if the corresponding prints are available. We regularly get this question from our customers. Scanning the negatives is better from a quality point of view. This discussion and the examples provided are useful to understand this issue. However, there are benefits for many people in scanning prints instead of negatives. First, many people do not keep their negatives as well organized as their prints. Second, determining what is on a negative to decide if it is worth scanning can be difficult for many people, particularly if organization is a problem. For some of our customers, scanning prints provides results which meet the goals of the project.
  
• Chapter 2: " Performance Characteristics of Film Scanners" describes the points for the evaluation of film scanners with a lot of product specific data and information. He discusses terms like bit depth, resolution, and density range (or DMAX). He includes a long discussion of scanner light sources and a third party add on called the Scanhancer, which serves to soften the light source. The length of this discussion is questionable, in our opinion.
  
• Chapter 3: "Scanning Film" offers a practical look at the scanning of films from evaluating the condition, cleaning the film of dust and particles, the proper handling of film, inserting film into the scanning device, and identifying the emulsion side. Then Steinhoff discusses what to many may be a bizarre concept, the destruction of originals. He correctly concludes that you should keep your originals after scanning (we concur fully). Other topics in include identifying film types.
  
  There is an interesting section about glass and glassless slide mounts with a great example scan showing the problems that may become apparent with glass mounts. We regularly see these degrading effects in the work that we do. Ideally we would pull film from glass carriers and remount it in glassless mounts. In practice, however, we don't do this most of the time. Doing this remounting has both economic and practical problems. The economic one is most obvious: labor and materials are need to do the remounting. The practical considerations are perhaps more important (though often they are second in the mind of our customers): removing older film from glass mounts can cause new problems. Sometimes the film has become stuck to the glass, or the film is brittle or damaged under the glass. As a matter of course, we do not remount film until we know that we have a good quality scan of the glass mounted film first. This should have been discussed in this book, but was not.
  
• Chapter 4: "File Formats" discusses choosing the correct file formats. Like most books written by photographers and technology enthusiasts, this book encourages the use of RAW file formats, high bit depth images, and uncompressed image formats. We have no disagreement with any of the factual statements that the author presents here. However, we believe that most people (who are not photographers or technology geeks) do not need RAW files and don't need uncompressed file formats like TIFF. Instead, our service encourages people to get very lightly compressed JPEG files instead - generated from a lossless format as a final editing step. Since most people will not edit their images after receiving them back from us, this makes sense much of the time.
  
  He continues with topics like selecting the right image size and resolution, absolute resolution of the device, relative resolution, output size, film scanner resolution and maximum print size.
  
• Chapter 5: "Color Management in Theory and Practice" walks the reader through a description of the basics of color theory and color management. This is useful material, but probably is not enough to understand this complex issue. We recommend a more focused book on the topic, like Real World Color Management by Fraser, et. al. Scanner calibration is an important concept, but difficult to achieve in practice unless you are scanning a large block of slides or negatives of the same film stock. Otherwise you would need a different calibration for each film stock. This implies the need for a calibration target on each film stock. In practice, this is difficult or impossible to achieve for most people - and practically this is very difficult given that few people have uniform film stocks. As shown in Steinhoff's examples, the effect of using the "wrong" profile is usually small and easily corrected after scanning; the exception to this is when scanning Kodachrome slides.
  
• Chapter 6: "Scanning Methods" does a good job in generalizing the processes or steps in scanning film, including offsetting the filmstrip, presorting, the preview scan, scanning, and multi-sampling. The example shown to support the use of multi-sampling is a compelling one. In practice, however, scanning with 16x multi sampling is far too time consuming for almost everyone. Most images do not show the drastic improvement his example shows - and most show no real improvements. Again, this appears to be written from the standpoint of a technologist or photographer who enjoys the possibilities at the expense of the practicalities.
  
• Chapter 7: "Scanning Correction Filters in Detail" and Chapter 8 "Configuring the Scanning Software" are very software and hardware specific, describing how each of the three scanning software packages studied in this book (Nikon Scan, VueScan, SilverFast) handle dust and scratch removal, restoration of color fading, digital GEM and ROC, highlight and shadow recovery. Besides ICE, which requires hardware support in the scanner, nearly all of the topics presented here are (in our opinion) best handled as post-scan processing steps rather than by using the awkward editors within the scanning software. Our goal with the actual scanning process is primarily to get a "good" initial histogram by properly setting exposure settings. The other adjustments are thus minimized and can be applied after the scan. Scanning to 16-bit files can help in this process, but is rarely required because post-scan adjustments are usually small and hence are unlikely to cause banding or other issues. The author does give a brief discussion of analog gain, which is sometimes useful at scan time as it changes the raw scanned image (in ways that can't be achieved in post-scan processing). In practice, analog gain is difficult and cumbersome to employ.
  
• Chapter 9: "Nikon Scan", Chapter 10: "VueScan" and Chapter 11: "SilverFast" are software-specific descriptions of these prominent scanning software package. It is evident that great detail of effort went into the preparation of these chapters. Steinhoff describes their respective setup and usage, with descriptions of their differences in relation to drivers and settings. These chapters might be useful if you have one or more of the selected scanning software packages or are thinking about purchasing one of them.
  
• Chapter 12: "Scan Workflows" introduces three software specific workflows (Nikon Scan, SilverFast, VueScan) that the author has personally proven in actual use. He suggests that the automated processing features in each specific software are rarely used in order to speed up the capture time. Topics include RAW data, quality recommendations, vital corrections before scanning (resolution, crop, set focus, adjust gain, ICE and FARE, black and white points). Probably the most important discussion in this chapter is the "Vital Corrections before Scanning" section. The other image adjustment elements in most scanning software are better achieved in a full-featured photo editor like Photoshop, rather than in the scanning software. We agree with Steinhoff's list of vital corrections.
  
• Chapter 13: "Nikon Capture Editor" describes the Nikon Capture Editor software in depth. This chapter goes a long way in convincing the reader that no other software will allow the practitioner to work with scanner created Raw files as well as Nikon does. If you are not working with RAW files, this chapter can be ignored.
  
• Chapter 14: "Correcting with Photoshop and Photoshop Plug-ins" describes the tools in Photoshop for scratch removal such as noise filters, the clone stamp, healing brush and spot healing brush, and the Polaroid plug-in for dust and scratch removal. This chapter also discusses some unique image corrections like correcting perspective distortion, selectively correcting shadows and highlights, straightening horizons, and a section on Photoshop plug-ins (including Kodak GEM, SHO, and ROC, Noise Ninja), and more. This is a very short chapter on image correction using Photoshop, focused on a few issues related to scanned images. This chapter seems insufficient; much more has been written on using Photoshop.
  
• Chapter 15: "Backup" outlines data protection strategies. This is a very short course in these mechanisms. Though it is a valuable topic to understand, this seems too brief to be of value. A better way to think about these issues is in relation to a full digital asset management system. Peter Krogh's The DAM Book is a book that we recommend.