Film Scanning with Foveon

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As I've been revisiting using a Digital Camera as a film scanner, I thought it might be interesting to see if using a Foveon Style sensor would have any advantages.

While it only has 25 effective megapixels, for 35mm scans and smaller, the extra color information and sharpness of the foveon sensor should be more than enough under ideal conditions.

One note is that the shutter slap on the sdqh isn't great and made getting sharp scans more difficult than a mirrorless with an Eletronic shutter.

But what I am interested most in is if the color response would appear to offer any advantage. 

For this setup it's more or less the same as my latest venture into film scanning:

DSLR SCANNING


sdqh with 105mm macro lens

While there are three kinds of film I could test, I think slides make for the easiest comparison as they result in an image without any additional processing to compensate for the color base or being inverted.


Because of the greater shadow noise of the sdqh at the same exposure, I took all the images as 3-5 shot HDR composites. I did the same for the DSLR reference but wasn't really needed as single images had enough dynamic range.


I made global adjustments to initally try and white balance to the same point in the same image, and get general contrast and exposure correctly set. So only global adjustments (WB/ting, Contrast/Exposure/Highlights/ect) where performed. 

Samples

Here are the 4 images shot with both from the same strip of Velvia.








Final Notes

One most interesting thing I noticed was that it wasn't really possible with a global adjustment to get the shadows and the highlights to have the same tint. 

The differences in color reflect an inability to correct globally to match and would either need more specific localized adjustments or creation of a color profile.

The other thing was that the Red/Yellows tended to be more saturated under the same general conditions with the Foveon setup.

I don't think I should speak to which is better as I think that should be left to personal preference.

But I do not think I need to use the sdqh to scan film in the future as needing to take multiple exposures to deal with the noise alone wasn't worth the hassle.



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