Nikon ES-2 film digitizing adapter

churinchurin Posts: 51Member
edited September 2020 in General Discussions
I appreciate any comment on this device. I am looking for a way to create picture files out of old color negative films.
Post edited by spraynpray on

Comments

  • SymphoticSymphotic Posts: 711Member
    Works great. I use it with a D850 and a 60 mm macro. For light I just put a light gray screen saver on my computer monitor and shoot against that. Post in Lightroom and photoshop works. I believe there is a color reversal in camera, but it turns your NEFs to JPGs, so I just reverse the color curves in post.
    It works even better for my father’s old color slides.
    Jack Roberts
    "Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought"--Albert Szent-Gyorgy
  • churinchurin Posts: 51Member
    Symphotic: Thanks for your reply.
    I am wondering how to turn a negative to a positive picture. Could you provide more details how to do it? I have Photoshop.
  • SymphoticSymphotic Posts: 711Member
    I start by opening in lightroom, then go to Develop, go to Tone Curve, make sure it is set up as “Linear” and drag the bottom left corner of the line to the top and the top right to the bottom. That alone inverts the negative to a positive, but it won’t look so great if you stop there. You make adjustments from there until it’s good enough or you are ready to open in Photoshop.
    As film behaves differently from digital and I spent a lot of time making adjustments to white balance, tone, exposure, presence, etc. But it can be pretty much be done using Lightroom. Or use the in-camera inversion in the D850.
    I just checked and the smarter people than me on Youtube have some good advice on how to optimize, and in general I could have saved a lot of time if I had followed their advice.
    Jack Roberts
    "Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought"--Albert Szent-Gyorgy
  • SymphoticSymphotic Posts: 711Member
    I want to add I took some photos with tungsten light film but used a daylight flash many years ago, when disco and polyester doubleknit leisure suits were a thing. The photos really could not be corrected well with filters in the dark room so I tossed the negatives in a drawer and forgot about them. When the ES-2 first came out I was looking for something to try it out with and I found these negatives. At first I thought it was junk be cause the conversion to positive looked terrible, but I could, by sliding my sliders all the way to the left or right in Lightroom, get acceptable color corrections from the raw files I made with the ES-2.
    So I’m happy with my purchase. But I’m really a family hero because I have photos on slides that my uncle, who was a serious amateur photographer and well known modern art collector, that I digitized and sent around.
    Jack Roberts
    "Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought"--Albert Szent-Gyorgy
  • ggbutcherggbutcher Posts: 390Member
    churin said:

    Symphotic: Thanks for your reply.
    I am wondering how to turn a negative to a positive picture. Could you provide more details how to do it? I have Photoshop.

    There's some good recent work on this in darktable, the 'negadoctor' module, they call it. I haven't tried it, but there's good feedback in the pixls.us forum.

    For an approach generic to specific software, I've had some success with per-channel curves to take out the orange cast, then a rgb curve to invert the image. For the per-channel curves, you need to put the left-most and right-most control points at the respective ends of the channel histogram, keeping them at their respective top and bottom. Then, the invert curve is just moving the bottom-left point to the bottom-right, then move the top-right point to the top-left, so the line slopes down rather than up. A bit challenging to describe in words...
  • churinchurin Posts: 51Member
    I will do inversion on D850 and use Photoshop to do post processing.
  • SymphoticSymphotic Posts: 711Member
    churin said:

    I will do inversion on D850 and use Photoshop to do post processing.

    The good thing about that is you get to see the result right away. The downside to that is your pictures get converted to jpegs. I think it is very easy to open the negative in LIghtroom and reverse the tone curve, but you have to make changes to the white balance and other settings, so your approach is a good one.

    I suggest that since your subject is film, it isn’t going anywhere, so start out in live view, take you picture in RAW, press the i button and select the color negative option, and take the picture again. That way you have both. The in-camera color reversal works really well.

    I suggest you try a white or gray screen on a computer monitor as a light source, put the camera and digitizer on a tripod, use a low ISO on have fun. You will bring back a lot of memories!
    Jack Roberts
    "Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought"--Albert Szent-Gyorgy
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