How Film Curl affects Scans

The depth of field of the Coolscan (and most film scanners) is very narrow.

The slides and negatives that I scan aren't entirely flat. But this is not normally a problem. There's one case that causes an issue.

Most of my negatives are cut into strips of four negatives. There's a slight buckling of the film towards the top and the bottom of the negatives, but this is usuallly flattened out in either the auto feeder or the Strip Film Holder.

However, at one, and sometimes both ends where the set of four negatives has been cut, there is often a buckle in the negative. This leads to the left or right hand edges of the negative scanning out of focus. A slight but distinctive colour cast is also quite common.

The strip can be seen here:

If the film is scanned in the Nikon Strip Film Holder, the colour cast and blurring is eliminated:

Unfortunately, the Strip Film Holder FH-2 is not supplied with all Coolscans.

Bent, Folded, Creased Negatives

I've got a bunch of old negatives (from family) that got thrown into a plastic bag. They are seriously folded. At some stage I'm going to have to deal with them.

I believe that I've got a glass film strip holder that came with my original Coolscan LS-2000. Unfortunately I can't find it at the moment.

For the time being, the creased negatives are sitting inside a large Sands & MacDougall? directory, with about a dozen heavy books stacked on top, in the hope that this will flatten them. (So far it doesn't seem to be making much difference.

Ultimately I'll need to either find my glass film strip holder, or possibly follow (with trepidation) an approach I've read about on the web. The idea is that you put your bent negative into a plastic film page, and then place a hot glass of water on to the page. The heat will flatten the negative whilst the plastic page will protect the negative. I'm kind of nervous about this approach, so we'll see.

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