RoboScan: Lego+Raspberry Pi-powered analog film roll scanner

https://github.com/bezineb5/RoboScan#roboscan

by ingve • 6 years ago

115 34 6 years ago

github.com

ingve• 6 years ago

Video of the newer RoboScan v4 in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRDomN48SOs

confiq2• 6 years ago

this should be in README.md

mhasbini• 6 years ago

The picture in the README is a link to a (older) YouTube video.

Self plug: I was annoyed by the lack of indicators: when it's a picture or a youtube link that I created https://mhasbini.com/blog/embed-youtube-in-github.html

E.g. of before & after: https://github.com/bezineb5/RoboScan/pull/2

mindracer• 6 years ago

This is really cool, scanning negatives can be a slow and laborious process.

Reminds me of the mongoose by cameradactyl https://www.cameradactyl.com/mongoose

blcArmadillo• 6 years ago

I'm also reminded of the Kinograph project: https://vimeo.com/66781749. It scans movie film using a DSLR and extracts the audio from the side of the film.

mitjak5• 6 years ago

cool resources, thank you! i was just wondering about scanning movie film. any other projects you can think of?

jojobas• 6 years ago

I guess an extension to call ffmpeg for Super8 and the like could make sense.

Perhaps direct projection onto the sensor (rather than using a lense) could make sense as well.

Scanning movie films used to be ridiculously expensive (and it shouldn't).

KaiserPro2• 6 years ago

Scanning movie films used to be ridiculously expensive (and it shouldn't).

It was expensive because it was pushing the boundaries of what was possible.

the northlight (https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/northlight/overview_nl...) which I had the pleasure of working with the prototype of is a spectacular machine.

Firstly it has really good registration, which means that in theory you should be able to scan the same film twice and it'll look exactly the same. Not only that its gentle, so you can scan really fragile stuff.

Add to that it over scans the living snot out of the film, plus an IR pass to get rid of the dust.

Also its not a square CCD, its a linear CCD that is scanned across the plate.

wdb• 6 years ago

I think I have found my holiday project. Got boxes full of dias that my dad made of Japan in the 70s. The idea is to follow my passed away footsteps and go to the same spots and try to make a similar photo over 50 years later :))

phn• 6 years ago

I would love to see the photos from 70s Japan. The ones you feel comfortable sharing with strangers, of course!

albertzeyer• 6 years ago

Very nice. We were just recently discussing how expensive this is, and that this would be nice for some hobby robotic project.

From a quick glance over the code, it seems to scan over the film roll and takes photos using the camera.

But I haven't really found much logic for post processing. You would need to adapt the colors in some way, right? It's a negative, so inverse them. But then they still need to be adapted in some way. Actually this was for me the most unclear aspect about such a project -- how to deal with the colors.

dbrgn2• 6 years ago

As suggested in another comment, the best way would probably to shoot in RAW (so you get the data directly from your camera's sensor) and then use postprocessing tools made for negatives. Darktable has a new module called "negadoctor" for this, see https://www.darktable.org/2020/08/darktable-3-2/ (ctrl+f negadoctor).

Darktable also supports Lua scripting, maybe that could be used to automate a workflow.

gsich5• 6 years ago

If you have the money, buy Negativelab Pro for Lightroom.

dvfjsdhgfv2• 6 years ago

I'd like to see an enlarged version of a negative scanned in this way. I experimented with taking pictures of film and the results were always far inferior than using a dedicated scanner.

dbrgn2• 6 years ago

Did you watch the video? It contains a few very impressive examples.

dvfjsdhgfv2• 6 years ago

Yes, I saw whole images resized to fit the video, and they are very nice - but I'd like to see the scan 1:1 to see how the grain is rendered.

mitjak5• 6 years ago

here you go: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rmiaquw3wnv3cvu/AACqp9bLXiDY5oCCU...

There are 16 bit TIFFs and JPEGs, along with a zoomed in crop (PNGs bc i wanted to have them be the same size for a side by side comparison). For the 2 scanners, these were scanned fully "raw", without any software colour correction or sharpening (FlexColor for the Imacon, Epson Scan 2 for the V600). The camera scan is using my 2012 Fuji X-E1 with a Micro-Nikkor 55mm @ f/8, and the V600 negative carrier, with an iPad as a light source (there's some barrel distortion; i'm still ironing out my rig). Final results corrected by my meatbag eye in Affinity (I had to increase saturation of the V600 scans to match the other two), hence the slightly different colour rendition, but the difference in grain resolution and overall detail should be pretty clear.

KaiserPro2• 6 years ago

thats really not half bad! considering that the imacon supposedly has a brilliant mount, to get that level of detail is quite impressive

puzzlingcaptcha• 6 years ago

Don't people normally use document scanners for that? What are the upsides/downsides? This seems like more difficult to control exposure.

jrockway• 6 years ago

I do a lot of film photography and do use a flatbed scanner to digitize. I like taking 4x5 negatives and making 100MP digital images that you can infinitely zoom into. But! It is a lot of work. (I wet mount, and take several scans to get the focusing perfect across the entire negative.)

You can get 90% as good results by putting the negative on a slide viewer (more commonly sold for tracing these days) and taking a picture with your digital camera. Will you extract every bit of information that the film captured? No. Will an amazing picture look amazing when digitized in this way? Absolutely. So it's worth considering if you already have a digital camera and are just getting started!

I have taken pictures of negatives hanging to dry with my phone, inverted them in Photoshop, and posted them to social media with good results. You don't need expensive equipment and to spend hours getting things perfect if you don't want to.

gsich5• 6 years ago

If you want to wait minutes for a single frame, go for it.

tmjwid3• 6 years ago

What a great little project. I find it strange somehow, through the wind, someone always posts a project that relates to me in my current hobbies here on hn. I've just started scanning my 35mm negatives with my dslr (with macro lens) and a film holder on a lightbox. It's easy and much quicker than a dedicated flatbed, but more work post process.

For anyone wanting to do this, you will need to invert your b&w or colour negatives with software capable of processing RAW files (lightroom, darktable, rawtherapee) white balance the negative, invert and then colour/exposure correct the final image. I use darktable for this and the latest version has a real nice plugin called negadoctor that can give you a great starting point. For lightroom, NegativeLabPro is the goto tool and works in a similar way to negadoctor but is better at producing the initial image.

renw0rp• 6 years ago

I'm curious, how is the quality of such a setup vs dedicated scanner?

scrdhrt• 6 years ago

I am using both a dedicated 35mm film scanner (not flatbed) and a DSLR with macro for repro, the latter for medium format film.

The outcome quality of both processes is identical and great quality, but the DSLR repro way is a little bit more cumbersome. It takes me longer to get a really good result with a lightbox than with the dedicated film scanner. Not by long, but it adds up if I have a couple of 120 film to repro.

I shoot repro with a Nikon D700 in RAW using a 105mm macro lens on a regular stand, with a bubble calibrator. The lightbox is a small cardboard box spray painted in black, with flippable/removable cutouts to fit 6x4,5 up to 6x7. I use an old discarded iPad mini, setup with a white image on max brightness as backlight.

Using Capture One (my preference of editing suite), I connect my camera with a USB cable and import directly into the editing suite. No need for importing of a CF/SD card. Smooth process.

tmjwid3• 6 years ago

Pretty much what scrdhrt has said is spot on. Quality is very much the same, and the output is rather good. I don't have anything to show you from my own work as a comparison, but there is plenty of reference material on reddit and photo blogs about the process.

Time wise, the speed of snapping a photo is also mostly outweighted by the time needed to post process the image (neg invert, white balance, colour correct) versus the slow scanning speed of a flatbed negative scanner. Never used the cheaper 35mm scanners you can buy, but from what I’ve seen they're just the dslr approach without the quality.

I think it comes down to two questions. 1: Do you own a dslr with a macro lens? 2: Do you know how to use raw editors like lightroom or darktable?

If yes to both, then dslr scanning is easily the cheaper of the two and is most likely the best route to go to test the process.

gsich5• 6 years ago

Much better. Unless you have a scanner with real 4000 dpi your DSLR with 20+ MP will achieve better and faster results.

mitjak5• 6 years ago

i'm also exploring this, and have found my mirrorless to produce noticeably sharper images than the Epson V600 but not quite as sharp as an Imacon Flextight.

to save time, i have saved some presets for colour correcting using a single curves layer. since i end up tweaking every scan anyway, it speeds down the workflow by cutting down on the process.

tmjwid3• 6 years ago

That's a great way to work and it is something I think I will do as well. create some presets that give good results then tweak accordingly. Now I just need to get better at colour correcting in the first place!

gsich5• 6 years ago

I did the same. I kept post processing to a minimum. Load pictures into Lightroom, apply NLP, save. If you have over 10k negatives you don't have time for every picture. NLP produces acceptable (and in my view very good) results with no additional processing required.

Also if you have that many negatives, every step you need to take is one step too many. My frames came from the camera without any borders, so no cropping needed. Don't put the negatives in the "wrong" way. Base vs. emulsion debate is just that - a debate with miniscule differences.

I had a foot-switch for release so that you can use both hands for the camera and focus. Then you'll achieve ~5 minutes for a full 36 frame roll of (strips of 4-6 frames) film.

bronson• 6 years ago

The machine learning to find each frame is impressive.

Has anyone seen a utility to recognize and deskew prints on a flatbed scanner? Found some interactive apps, but nothing that is automated to work in a pipeline like shown here.

RoboScan: Lego+Raspberry Pi-powered analog film roll scanner

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