RNI All Films 4 - Pro Presets

A Review by Sebastian Schlueter

Introduction

What is it about film, that makes our heart sing? Why do people still shoot film, when digital is so convenient to use? There must be something that goes beyond detail, sharpness, precise color reproduction and this probably the "soul" of photography!

Beautiful grain, stunning tonality, bright and vivid colors, beautiful skin tones and subdued elegant shades of gray, all these attributes belong to certain type of film and wait to be explored, not only by the nostalgic enthusiast who is still drawn to the real medium, but also by the interested digital shooter, who is looking for a way to introduce the magic of film into the digital workflow.

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Epson Scan Tutorial for Color Negative FILM

Epson´s consumer scanners all come with "Epson Scan", a scanning software for all needs. Many scanner operators however tend to use third party software for their scanning tasks. Today I will show you how to get good results from Epson Scan, but I will also try to elaborate the drawback of Epson Scan and why Silverfast will give you even better results in the end.

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Scanning Example - Castro Night Shot

After my video tutorial in the last post, I thought a short follow up post with a detailed example would be helpful. So, no video today, but some further explanations on how I scanned the photograph below. But just in case you have missed the video, I highly recommend going back and watch it. It will give you a good overview of all the tasks required during the scanning process.

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Scanning Color Negative Film

I always wanted to write about scanning color negative film. Now I was finally able to put together this site with lots of useful information to get started with scanning color film. The main part of this section is the video tutorial that can be found below.

While positive film seems so much easier to scan, obviously you can see the positive image already, it seems some kind of mystery to scan print film. The first thing you hear is, that you cannot get accurate results due to the orange mask. The orange mask and the fact that the image is inverted are of course two complications we have to deal with, but these challenges are not as complicated as you might think. The biggest problem is that we need to accept the fact that there is no accurate or "correct" scan that we retrieve from the scanner. Even during darkroom printing all prints were interpretations. The old Ansel Adams quote about the score and the performance is also true for color film. Once you have accepted this, you are good to go!

Make you own scans, your own interpretations, give the scans your artistic voice. That is what makes home scanning so fascinating.

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