jaygraysydney
Scanning Rig
The latest iteration of my scanning rig - 18mm MDF board and 3/8in threaded rod.
SOOOOOO much more stable and easy to use than an inverted tripod, with no vibration to speak of at all. And it's up on a bench with saves my back, and it lets my tripod get back to being a tripod.
I've changed my scanning technique too - I still take around 10 to 25 digital frames per 6x9 slide, with 50% overlap, but notice that the camera is now cross-wise to the transparency so that there aren't any frames of "just sky" for the stitching software to struggle with - it has a horrible time trying to find control points when there isn't much detail in the frame, and that seems to cause the only stitching failures I encounter.
Additionally, I have started shooting each frame as a bracketed stack to get more dynamic range and rescue a LOT of highlight and shadow detail - 4 to 6 images 2 stops apart, and then fusing each stack in Photomatix Pro, using the "soft" preset, which gives really natural results. Photomatix has a "Batch" menu, so I can set up a big merge job for several hundred images and then just go to bed!
I have also given up on stitching with Hugin - it's too manual and makes too many stitching errors. I'm now using Autopano Giga, which works great if you enforce a lens focal length on the image properties tab of > 1000mm (I use 9999mm) so it does a totally flat stitch, and render with a planar perspective. The resulting image is just a little sharper than the one from Hugin too. Autopano also has fantastic "fire and forget" workflow, which means I can go do something else while it renders the frames for several slides in one go (I put the merged HDR files for each slide in a separate sub-folder, so Autopano sees each one as a separate panorama).
Here is an example of the results - around 46 megapixels, cropped down from around 62 megapixels in this instance:
www.flickr.com/photos/119759627@N06/15174233631/sizes/o/
I'm still using my old-school Schnieder Componon enlarger lens on some cheap x-mount extender rings and a m42 mount adapter ring, however I am starting to suspect it is not resolving all the detail off the slide - I can read some of those signs with the 10x loupe, but they are blurry in the digitized image. I think I am going to have to try a modern computer-designed-aspherical-low-dispersion-multi-coated-autofocus macro lens for comparison.
Next task after that: laser-cut acrylic film holders, and an Arduino controlled stepper motor setup with a Ruby script driving a Sony a5100 with 30mm macro lens via Sony's RESTful wireless API, to make it almost fully automatic!
credit for original inspiration:
petapixel.com/2012/12/23/why-you-should-digitize-your-fil...
Scanning Rig
The latest iteration of my scanning rig - 18mm MDF board and 3/8in threaded rod.
SOOOOOO much more stable and easy to use than an inverted tripod, with no vibration to speak of at all. And it's up on a bench with saves my back, and it lets my tripod get back to being a tripod.
I've changed my scanning technique too - I still take around 10 to 25 digital frames per 6x9 slide, with 50% overlap, but notice that the camera is now cross-wise to the transparency so that there aren't any frames of "just sky" for the stitching software to struggle with - it has a horrible time trying to find control points when there isn't much detail in the frame, and that seems to cause the only stitching failures I encounter.
Additionally, I have started shooting each frame as a bracketed stack to get more dynamic range and rescue a LOT of highlight and shadow detail - 4 to 6 images 2 stops apart, and then fusing each stack in Photomatix Pro, using the "soft" preset, which gives really natural results. Photomatix has a "Batch" menu, so I can set up a big merge job for several hundred images and then just go to bed!
I have also given up on stitching with Hugin - it's too manual and makes too many stitching errors. I'm now using Autopano Giga, which works great if you enforce a lens focal length on the image properties tab of > 1000mm (I use 9999mm) so it does a totally flat stitch, and render with a planar perspective. The resulting image is just a little sharper than the one from Hugin too. Autopano also has fantastic "fire and forget" workflow, which means I can go do something else while it renders the frames for several slides in one go (I put the merged HDR files for each slide in a separate sub-folder, so Autopano sees each one as a separate panorama).
Here is an example of the results - around 46 megapixels, cropped down from around 62 megapixels in this instance:
www.flickr.com/photos/119759627@N06/15174233631/sizes/o/
I'm still using my old-school Schnieder Componon enlarger lens on some cheap x-mount extender rings and a m42 mount adapter ring, however I am starting to suspect it is not resolving all the detail off the slide - I can read some of those signs with the 10x loupe, but they are blurry in the digitized image. I think I am going to have to try a modern computer-designed-aspherical-low-dispersion-multi-coated-autofocus macro lens for comparison.
Next task after that: laser-cut acrylic film holders, and an Arduino controlled stepper motor setup with a Ruby script driving a Sony a5100 with 30mm macro lens via Sony's RESTful wireless API, to make it almost fully automatic!
credit for original inspiration:
petapixel.com/2012/12/23/why-you-should-digitize-your-fil...