I remember when I was about the get the Pakon, I couldn’t really find any good information about black and white scans. There was some Matt Day video from way back where he showed how he did his scans, but to my eye they looked way contrasty and annoyingly sepia toned. Was there some other way to get good scans?
I experimented for a while, researched what other people have found out, and saw that some people had gotten good slide scans with TLXClientDemo. There was a hack to get the Black and White and Slide film options un-greyed from the film type selection radio buttons, and it was also possible to get raw files from this scanning software.
Looking into the raw files, and how to convert them, I couldn’t find anything that did what I want, the way that I wanted. And having software development as my main day job, I just wrote a raw file converter myself. (You can find the source code for it here). The difference with my converter compared to the ImageMagick one that is circulating is that I have support for b/w and slide film and I have some.. maybe “color science” is the wrong word, but I have added some tweaks that I found useful. It tries to find a suitable black and white point and adjusts color balance for a more neutral tone. Unfortunately it only works on Windows right now.
Here is my previous blog post about the Kodak Pakon F135 Plus.
Anyway, in this blog post I wanted to detail my current way of scanning Black and White negative and positive slide film.
So first off, I don’t use PSI (Pakon Scanning Interface?) anymore. I use the TLXClientDemo one instead. It is ugly and the user interface is confusing, but it is more powerful. Use the AutoIt snippet for enabling positive and BW options, and select BW. Select Base16 and skip all the other options.
Let it scan as usual, and when it’s done click Save. If you want to use my converter, don’t rotate any images in this stage as it expects the files to be in the default orientation. In the Save dialog window, skip all the options again, make sure you have original width and height, select “To Client Memory and the Planar with header option”. Go ahead and save, and move the files from the xp machine to your workstation.
On your workstation, start the converter, check the “Bw Negative” option for Bw negative and leave it unchecked for positive slide film. Sorry for the UI, I am a developer not a designer. Then drag the files to where it says “Drag images here”. Let it do its thing, when it’s done you have the raw files and some new png files in the folder where you put your raw files. You can go ahead and delete the raw files at this point, the png files are your new “raw files”.
Go ahead and look through your images, rotate them if needed, and then the ones you want to use, open up in Photoshop or light room. From here onwards it’s mostly a matter of taste, but I like to set the black and white point a little more aggressively and then adjust the midpoint in levels to something that looks nice. If the image looks flat at this point I go into curves and give it a slight S-curve to boost midtone contrast.
But remember, always save your files as 8 bit RGB files, even when they are black and white. So change the image format from 16 bit to 8 bit, and then to RGB from Greyscale.
Then you are done, at least if you are following my work flow. Image is done, looking nice, enjoy.
Having the 16 bit files to make contrast adjustments in makes a big difference, especially if you have very contrasty or very flat negatives. However, this is a much slower workflow than using PSI. You have to decide if it is worth the extra time and effort. But considering how fast the Pakon is doing the actual scan, from start to finish it is still not a huge amount of time we are talking about. I always scan my negatives before cutting them up, so it is less than 10 minutes.
Let me know if you have any questions about the Pakon, it is difficult to find information.
Also, please take a look in the brand now shop part of this website that I just launched. If you see anything you like, please consider supporting this site and blog so I can keep it up and running.