Developing Negatives Digitally

This past Christmas, my siblings gifted me a gently-used Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI Micro lens.  I have been wanting to fool around with a macro lens for awhile, but especially for the purpose of developing old negatives.  I visited Costa Rica in 1997 and Germany in 1999, back before I'd even thought about digital capture, and while I doubt I got much in the way of good pictures, digitizing the film seems like a fun project.

My parents also have some old slides (what a trip through the way-back machine that's been!) that I figured I could digitize as well.  My father was a photographer in his own right back in the day, and he lent me his lightbox to play around with.  I have to see if I can get his old bellows to work with the lens (that would be a minor coup), but if so, I should be able to make some pretty solid prints.

My experience with Walmart's digital scans is pretty poor.  They have a nice Fuji process for printing (which I prefer to Kodak's), but their scans are barely 1.5 megapixels and lack any sort of quality.  While I can and have doctored the images in the Gimp, it's really not nearly as good as you can produce with a suitable negative development workflow.




The Walmart scan (edited) first:

One of the nice things is that it retains the film grain, and it's pretty clean (i.e., there isn't much in the way of scanning artifacts).  But as I said, it's a measly 1.5MP and doesn't do much for you in the way of enlargements or, if needed, qualitative improvements to exposure, et c.

So I dropped the negative on the light box, took a picture of it, and started fooling around with the RAW workflow on my Linux box (Geeqie / UCRAW / the Gimp):

I still haven't gotten close to mastering any technique here, but the interesting thing is that you can still take advantage of the great dynamic range of film this way.  RAW editing allows a great deal more latitude in exposing the image, so you can easily pull down the highlights or pump up the shadows.  It's almost like having a do-over on the original shot.  And what's more, the image checks in at a healthy 8MP, suitable for most printing purposes.  It keeps the feel of film by retaining the grain.  All in all, a win-win situation.

I'd note one last thing regarding the technique, and that is that focusing using live view on the d7000 body made this incredibly easy.  You can't get any sharper than what's recorded on film, but it's certainly easy to get blurrier if you're off by just a little.  Stopping down (f8 or f11) and using a remote (ISO 100 helps prevent sensor noise from posing any problems) is a great way to keep your heartbeat from messing things up, too.