I learned how to use a camera with these, a pair of Canon cameras given to me by a close
family friend.
This one in particular, the Canon F-1, is delightful to use.
Of course people familiar with the Canon T90 will know that it is arguably the best manual
focus camera Canon ever made, but the vintage charm, clunky feel, and primitive operation
of the F-1 made it my preferred go-to because I’m weird and eccentric.
I first got my hands on these in 2007, when a digital SLR was well out of reach for me.
At the time, ordinary print film could still be purchased pretty much everywhere, and Costco
would develop a roll for $1.89.
Much cheaper than spending a thousand dollars on a decent DSLR and lens to go with it.
Anyway, the one thing I needed was a competent film scanner, as I planned to just pay to
have the film developed, then scan it at a high resolution--a roundabout way of having
a digital camera.
I ended up buying a refurbished Epson scanner, and it had a feature I didn’t really understand
at the time, but which was really cool: Digital ICE.
Digital ICE may sound like the most nineties things ever, but in fact the ICE standards
for Image Correction and Enhancement.
The system used in film scanners was developed by Kodak at their Austin Research Center,
though at the time it was referred to as Applied Science Fiction which is a much better name.
I’m not sure exactly when the system was released but it probably was in the nineties,
as this PC magazine article from 1998 seems totally amazed at the new Nikon Super Coolscan
2000.
Let’s join together in a brief moment of silence for Kodak.
You had it all, and then you just…
Yeah.
So, what does Digital ICE actually do?
Well, it’s a dust and scratch removal feature that works almost miraculously well.
It can make an image go from this, to this.
Some absolute purists will insist on never using it because it softens the image slightly
and ...ehhh... but most people with this attitude just scare people away from photography altogether.
Side-note
Photography enthusiasts tend to get hung up on specs like color accuracy, sharpness, compression,
file format, and more to a pedantic level.
I understand that professional photographers want and need the best equipment and will
work to find the best methods, but for amateurs like myself this sometimes works to create
lingering self-doubt.
Forum threads arguing about which camera is best, which settings you should use, why you
should NEVER use jpegs, etc. can end up making those reading the thread worry that they’re
not choosing the optimal methods, and that somehow their work is worse for it.
My advice?
Do what you think is best.
Did the automatic color correction make it look better to you?
If yes, go ahead and use it.
Don’t go down the rabbit hole of chasing technical perfection at the expense of exploring
your own creativity.
If it looks good to you, that’s all that matters.
With that out of the way, let’s get back to the subject at hand because it’s freaking
cool!
To show you, I’ve scanned some film.
This long-lost set of negatives has been sitting around, gathering dust.
So, when scanned, they looked like this.
Dust on the film will appear white because the dust blocks light, which the scanner interprets
correctly as dark spots, but as the film contains a negative image, it has to be inverted, and
these dust spots get inverted to bright white when rendering the image as a positive.
But, when you scan them with Digital ICE, they look like this.
Pretty crazy, right!
But what’s even cooler, is how this works.
First a bit about the scanner.
This is not the same scanner that I started with.
In fact, this was one of those rare Goodwill finds where you ask yourself if it was donated
by mistake.
It’s a $210 dollar purchase today on Amazon, and it cost well more than that at the time
I picked it up for this paltry sum.
And it’s a substantial upgrade from my old one as it uses LEDs as its illumination source,
and not cold cathode fluorescent lights which require warm-up.
You’ll see why that’s so important later on.
This is a flatbed scanner like any ordinary document scanner, and when scanning a photograph
or a piece of paper, the scanner uses two rows of LEDs to illuminate whatever it’s
scanning, and between them lies a single row of really tiny light sensors that build an
image as the scanning head dutifully travels below the glass.
But this doesn’t work to scan film, because light needs to travel through the film and
not reflect off of it.
What separates this scanner from an ordinary one is a second light source located in the
lid of the scanner.
This functions as a travelling backlight, and it follows the scanning head to allow
for scanning film.
Film scanners are also separated from their document brothers by a very high resolution
scanning array.
This scanner’s sensor is capable of resolving 6,400 pixels per inch, meaning it can produce
a theoretical image with dimensions over 6,000 by 9,000 pixels from a standard frame of film,
or an over 54 megapixel image.
In nearly all cases this is overkill to the extreme, and it’s likely that this consumer-grade
scanner’s stepper motors can’t reliably move in small enough increments to actually
resolve that resolution in the Y dimension anyway, but still.
Impressive.
For the record, I usually scan at 3,200 DPI which is able to resolve the grain of many
films.
Now, to the fun part.
When you use Digital ICE, the scanner actually scans each negative or slide twice.
You’ll hear it get into position, make one pass of a scan, then the backlight and scanning
head return to their parked position.
But right when they stop, you hear a click.
That click is the light source switching from your standard issue white light, to infrared.
You can see this with a smartphone camera--many smartphone cameras detect infrared light and
render it as a purplish glow.
This is also handy for seeing if remote control batteries are any good.
You see, the film itself is mostly transparent to infrared light, but dust on the film will
block it from coming through.
When the scanner makes it way through the second time, it will see an image that is
completely empty except for where dust lies on the film.
Scratches and oils from fingerprints will distort the infrared light, and the scanner
can detect this distortion, too.
The result is that on the second pass, the scanner will produce an image composed only
of where scratches, dust, or general defects are located on the film.
After it’s scanned the second time, software inside the scanner creates a composite of
the two images.
It will use the data on where scratches and dust are to remove affected areas of the image.
It will then fill these areas in using information from what’s around them, and it usually
does a bang-up job.
I am always impressed with how well this works.
Now of course it’s not perfect, there are some artifacts here that it didn’t completely
remove, but what’s remarkable is that in most places, it appears to be completely flawless.
The algorithm responsible for deciding what to fill in the empty space with is so good
that it mimics the grain structure of the film itself.
You would have no idea that this area has been retouched.
Pixel-peeping shows that Digital ICE had almost no effect on the clarity of the image, and
appears to have done nothing except remove flaws.
Here are some slides.
I shot some rolls of slide film, too, which looked like this without dusting.
Observe how well digital ICE is able to take care of really dusty slides.
I’d like to take another brief side-note.
There’s something magical about slide film to me.
This IS the photograph.
A slide is just a piece of the very film that was in your camera mounted in cardboard or
plastic so you and slide projectors can interact with it easily and without touching it.
Unlike today where cameras save digital files of ones and zeros which you need a device
to be able to interpret, slide film becomes a literal photograph.
The light that came through the lens and landed on the film behind it looked nearly exactly
like this.
It’s just really cool to me to be holding a physical object that captured light and
through processing became an actual copy of that light.
Anyway, here is where Digital ICE can sometimes be detrimental.
Images with lots of detail tend to obscure dust on their own, particularly with slides
as the dark dust is harder to notice than the bright white dust from negatives.
Sometimes it really is better to not use digital ICE, as complex images can be too much for
the algorithm.
This image in particular seemed relatively defect-free, but Digital ICE saw a bit of
dust here, and didn’t really know how to re-fill in the detail of the sign.
To be honest, it would have been better to leave this alone, though it is admittedly
a tiny portion of the image.
Hey look, Kodak!
Same with this photograph, though it was very dusty, the cacophonous nature of the leaves
and organic material on the ground made it hard to notice, and this bit of dust shows
how things can go wrong.
It’s not hard to see once you know it’s there, but it’s easy to ignore.
Digital ICE certainly saw it, and its imperfect correction ended up making it much more noticeable.
Digital ICE tends to do better in areas that are low-detail such as the sky or on clothing,
as the algorithm can rely on adjacent areas to fill in the defect.
In these cases it merely has to mimic the grain structure and color of the areas next
to the defect.
If any sort of pattern or high level of detail surrounds the problem area, it can in some
cases end up making the defect more noticeable as it fails to convincingly fill it in.
Digital ICE also has a few technical limitations.
It can only be used on color negative film or E-6 process slides, which includes most
color slides such as Ektachrome and Fuji Velvia.
Conventional black and white film doesn’t work because with this film, the image is
composed of silver molecules.
These molecules block light from passing through, and that's how
it creates the dark areas of the film.
The silver will also block the infrared light on the second scan, so when you use Digital
ICE, the scanner will see the exact same image from both passes.
It’s smart enough to realize there’s nothing it can do, and doesn’t bother trying,
so you just don’t get any help.
However, C41 process black and white film, which can be identified by its orange film
base rather than the gray of true black-and-white film, can use Digital ICE.
This type of black-and-white film was mainly sold in stores as a novelty film, designed
to be compatible with the standard C41 color development process.
Images on this film are composed of dyes like in normal color film, and these dyes are transparent
to infrared.
So, Digital ICE still works with this film.
Kodachrome slide film also doesn’t behave too well with Digital ICE, though it can depending
on the slide.
In this case, the cyan dye in the film can absorb some of the infrared light, which occasionally
becomes detected as a defect.
The scanner might try to remove things it shouldn’t, and the results can be weird.
I don’t have any Kodachrome slides to test this on, as although Simon and Garfunkel tried
their best to convince her otherwise, mama took my Kodachrome away in 2010.
However, google Kodachrome and Digital ICE and you’ll see some good examples.
I’ll link a particularly good one in the description.
The biggest drawback to using Digital ICE is that it more than doubles the time it takes
to scan film, an already a tediously slow process.
Which brings me back to why this scanner is such an upgrade from my old one.
The CCFL backlight of my old scanner required about a one minute warmup between each successive
scan when using Digital Ice, as the lamp would cool back down during the infrared scan.
This made using it a real chore.
A fully loaded film holder would take another 12 minutes on top of the more than doubled
scan time needed for the second scan and image processing.
This could easily make scanning 12 negatives take over a half hour.
It still takes this scanner about twice as long to perform a scan with Digital ICE, but
I think it works wonders.
Like I said before, some people refuse to use it, and it is true that for slides and
negatives that aren’t damaged, a duster spray can is capable of producing a nearly
flawless image.
And it’s also true that Digital ICE can occasionally produce weird glitches of its
own, like how it made this piece of dust look worse after correction.
But I still think being able to go from this, to this, without any sort of input is just
amazing.
When it works, which it usually does, it’s nothing short of awesome.
Thanks for watching, I hope you learned something interesting in this Tech Exploration (though
if you’re a photography buff, you probably didn’t).
If you’re new to this channel and you liked what you saw, why not subscribe?
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I’ll see you next time.