What an odd thing to have a LLM make. There are already plenty of options for existing software for film scanning. I use negPy (https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy) to scan photos with a digital camera setup, but it interfaces with quite a few film scanners (anything supported by SANE) and handles inversion and editing quite nicely. You can then export to any other software to do image based tagging, though adding dates and location is still going to be somewhat tedious (negPy does have a bulk edit functionality that helps with this).
Also the mouse take-over is no bueno on the site. And some of the fonts are really grainy.
PaulHoule 15 hours ago [-]
Also I cannot understand the nostalgia for film. By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors. Plus it costs a fortune and costs more to develop. Digital? I can be doing group photos at a festival and review the photos I just took on a tablet and if there aren’t any where everybody has their eyes open I can take another.
macintux 14 hours ago [-]
Speaking for myself, I like film for a few reasons.
The wide variety of form factors keeps things interesting. Yesterday I went to shoot a sunrise, and I took a panoramic 6x17, a pinhole 6x12, and my TLR (which I didn’t shoot) at 6x6.
Everything about shooting film is more deliberate. Simply loading a medium format is typically time-consuming, developing the negatives, and if you’re lucky enough to have access to an enlarger, creating your own prints is very satisfying.
Slow but rewarding.
And I spend all day in front of a computer; it’s nice to have a very analog hobby.
musictubes 14 hours ago [-]
Like all analog workflows the attraction is the process itself. The decision path is one way, path dependency is permanent. You can think of it as a roguelike (the game genre) approach to creative expression. Working with constraints is an excellent way to develop your creative chops. Analog workflows, pen and ink, paint, wet plate photography, audio recording on tape, film photography, etc. all hem in the artist in different ways. It is the play inside the constraints and honing the craft that make them enjoyable to do.
There is also something to creating a physical thing that is immensely satisfying. Bits are bits and no matter how useful they may be they end up feeling very much the same as ever other undifferentiated bit in the trillions of photos, sounds, programs, spreadsheets, etc. Capturing light on film and then splashing them with chemicals results in something that you hold in your hand and now is a unique object.
So yes, digital photography is very useful and cost effective. Film photography is about fun or challenging yourself. It causes you to practice deliberate decision making in a creative process. If that sounds meaningless or stupid then it isn’t for you.
wrp 10 hours ago [-]
One example of benefiting creatively from working with constraints. Back in the 1980s, I read a comment from a newspaper sports editor that went something like this -- "Back when sports photographers used the big 4x5 Graflex camera, a guy would go out to a game with 5 plates and come back with 5 usable shots. Now guys use motorized 35 mm cameras, shoot several rolls, and often come back without a single good shot."
rubikscube09 9 hours ago [-]
> Working with constraints is an excellent way to develop your creative chops
Exactly. As someone who DJs (I know - the most low-skill hobby in existence), beatmatching by ear rather than using computer displays is helpful because it teaches you to listen to the music you're playing and how your mix sounds (the main output of DJing) rather than doing something because a screen says it's optimal.
padraigfl 14 hours ago [-]
For me it's largely to avoid the temptation of things like being able to immediately review the photos and "I can take another".
I'm very much someone who wants a quick uncritical snap of a moment and very little interest in how well it's framed or how the people are looking though.
Also a bit sick of having thousands of photos that I'll never get around to curating into anything worth my time looking back on. They all just get dumped on an external hard drive and never looked back on.
RE: the cost it can be cheap enough. B&W is very easy to develop at home for not much and if you get a half frame camera you can get 72 shots from a single roll which can take an incredibly long amount of time to get through.
eloisius 12 hours ago [-]
> By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors
Only if you’re a nerd that thinks in terms of data collection. Some film stocks produce beautiful images that aren’t easy to emulate. Why paint or draw with graphite when you have an inkjet?
snowwrestler 3 hours ago [-]
I liked to shoot slide film back when film was all there was.
From a utilitarian, “f/8 and be there” perspective, my iPhone today is way way better. I always have it with me and it handles pretty much any light condition I encounter, including near darkness.
And I took a 4/3 mirrorless digital body with a zoom lens to Africa recently, and got tons of sharp, well-exposed photos of wildlife.
But a slide is a picture, in a literal physical way. There’s no format or device needed. I hand it to anyone, and they can hold it up to a light and see the picture. It is a piece of art the way a sculpture is a piece of art; it embodies itself. I can keep it like a book, hand it over, pass it on. That is very cool, and looking through my old slides is satisfying to me in a way that opening up my laptop and scrolling through pixels is not.
bensyverson 13 hours ago [-]
Lots of reasons, but ones that matter to me: the batteries last for months, there’s no boot up time, and there’s no screen, which encourages you to keep your own eyes open.
account42 11 hours ago [-]
There is no boot time with any digital camera worth its salt either.
macintux 11 hours ago [-]
Heh, I don’t think I even have any film cameras with batteries.
taquacin 5 hours ago [-]
Some people like photographing with a camera rather than a computer that shoots 4k video, has bluetooth, social media uploads.
dlivingston 13 hours ago [-]
Digital isn't "real" anymore - analog is.
phony-account 12 hours ago [-]
> Also I cannot understand the nostalgia for film.
Why even put it in terms of ‘nostalgia’?
When someone takes up watercolor painting, do you also dismiss this as ‘nostalgia’? Why is film photography as a hobby any less interesting or legitimate on its own merits than making pottery the way it was made 10.000 years ago?
I often find it’s an older (even elderly) crowd that dismisses film-photography in this way. They maybe shot film when they were younger, discovered digital (which they always describe as being “objectively superior” - as though two totally different media can be compared this way), and then dismiss film users as somehow deluded ‘hipsters’ or as people merely indulging in nostalgia.
In my case, as someone who took up film photography 15 years ago, and shoot it alongside digital, I find film not only a more satisfying and thoughtful process, but also a superior artistic artifact: I prefer film’s color, the subtle ways that film handles highlight falloff, and even the ‘accidents’ that happen when chemical and light fuse to create an image.
Incidentally there are more and more ways to enjoy the entire process without a darkroom nowadays: a changing bag and a unit like the AGO film processor from Vintage Visual [0] make it simple to just take out and pack away all that’s needed to go from photograph to scan and print without a lot of space or mass of hassle.
Objectively superior: I can shoot basketball in an indoor arena at 6400 ISO and it looks great with digital noise reduction. With antishake on the Olympus 4/3 camera I can bird with a 600 mm lens that is the length of a 300 lens and can be handheld!. Sharpness is superior. I can take group photos and know I got everybody.
tristor 7 hours ago [-]
A micro four thirds camera is objectively inferior to film, because it doesn't have the same visual/perceptual resolution. That said, IBIS and high dynamic range sensors are amazing technology that we're all thankful for. Also, you can handhold 600mm lenses on full frame cameras also, Nikon for instance has telephoto primes that use phresnel lens elements and are definitely handholdable. I shoot the 600mm f/6.3, 500mm PF f/5.6, 400mm f/4.5, and 300mm PF f/4 all handheld, and while the 600 is on the tail end of what is handholdable and you give up some light for reducing the size/weight (mostly through a smaller objective), it's entirely doable. So your example would have been better looking at full frame mirrorless. Sure, m4/3 lenses are significantly lighter/smaller, but they're also not remotely comparable to film.
latexr 12 hours ago [-]
> By any objective metric it performs much worse
Which is only important if all you care about is a straight line towards perfection. But imperfections can make a work interesting and spark creativity.
> I can be doing group photos at a festival and review the photos I just took
That’s a feature for you, but for many it’s a bug. Friction matters. You can remove friction or add friction to change your behaviour and thus your outcome.
You seem to derive satisfaction from getting as good a photo as you can get straight away. Perhaps you even delete ones which look “wrong”. But other people prefer to carry on with the moment instead of pausing it to review what they just did. Whatever the photo will be, it will be, they don’t even think about it anymore until it’s time to get the film developed and relive the memories at that point. And because they had to make choices (film is expensive) they pay much more attention to each photo and appreciate it on a different level even if someone had their eyes closed.
There’s no right or wrong here, to each their own.
tristor 14 hours ago [-]
>Also I cannot understand the nostalgia for film. By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors.
1. The nostalgia comes from a few things, one of which is the nostalgia for the time and place where film was common, rather than for the film itself, the film becomes a hallmark or totem.
2. Kind of, but also not really. Besides the fact that there are many formats of film, it's possible to get >800 lp/mm of resolution in some films, and the best color films were in excess of 150 lp/mm. Even thinking about lp/mm obscures what film does, because with any analog format (this isn't just limited to photography), falloff outside of the resolving power of the medium is done on gradual curves, as film doesn't have "pixels". To a close approximation, it's only within the last 3-4 years that digital cameras have achieved equivalent resolution to color films, and they /still/ don't achieve equivalent resolution to fine art black and white films at full frame (35mm) size. Additionally, film and digital are fundamentally different not just in capture, but in expression. Digital images are emissive, while printed images are reflective, that is when you look at an image on your screen that image has uniform brightness defined by the backlight of the display and limited in color reproduction by its CRI and gamut, when you look at a printed image the brightness and color reproduction is limited by the print process and the room lighting, looking at a printed image under studio lighting, gallery lighting, or in sunlight has a higher perceptual quality than any digital image on any screen. Does that mean film is better than digital? No, not at all. You can print digital images too, and they will look better printed at high quality than they do on your screen when under good lighting conditions.
I primarily shoot digital these days, although I do occasionally use a 4x5 or medium format film camera. Having tried digital backs for medium format, I can strongly say that once you get outside of full frame, digital still has a long way to go to match the quality of film.
dm319 19 hours ago [-]
I don't understand either, not only are there open source tools available for scanning, but there are also colour-calibration slides which can be purchased. They are a known exposure/colour profile, allowing you to correct for your particular type of film and scanner properties, essentially calibrating conversion of raw negative to a correctly balanced positive image.
deadbabe 17 hours ago [-]
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
hankbond 2 days ago [-]
Very neat. I have a love-hate relationship with a unique type of digital sensor called the Foveon X3, which needs a particular (very sluggish and limited capability) software made by Sigma to convert the RAWs. Recently I have been using AI to create a converter that processes the RAWs in a similar fashion with some improvements.
This is one of those cases where its a means-to-an-end (I just want to take more photos without being bogged down) and less of a project for me to learn how to reverse-engineer and design signal processing pipelines. I am very grateful for what recent models are enabling me to do.
10729287 2 days ago [-]
Everyone has a love/hate relationship with Foveon, that's the beauty of the sensor isn't it ? Would you mind sharing your project ? That's awesome. Have you been able to compare crispness of files ? Dng compatibility from latest cameras, although it results in huge files, was pretty useful but files were not as sharp as native X3F developed in Sigma Photo Pro.
hankbond 11 hours ago [-]
Likely because SPP bakes in "detail recovery" with a high pass filter in its early processing stage alongside noise suppression. SPP does a lot beyond prepping and calibrating the raw layer data. Some aspects of that can be desirable but for portraits I find the lack of control over that processing step to be a real downer.
I am currently working on recreating more aspects of classic X3F processing and it's looking like the future of Foveon is very bright.
robotmay 1 days ago [-]
Have you tried a Foveon sensor camera for film scanning? I was wondering about it recently and how it would perform - the easily removable IR filter and different way the sensor works could be really interesting.
hankbond 6 hours ago [-]
Since there is some non-linear processing happening in the default renderer I'm not sure that it would work that well.
devindotcom 2 days ago [-]
Remind us what the Foveon sensor's quirk was? Something in the subpixel layout as I recall. A non-bayer pattern since abandoned and largely unsupported, yet effective somehow. But maybe I'm imagining this.
10729287 2 days ago [-]
Foveon sensor is composed of three Red/blue/green layers, so each pixels know exactly its color, while the Bayer sensor used by other manufacturers is composed of pixels that are either red, blue or green, and that implies some reading out of its color and its neighbour's one... and some glitches (typically moire or purple fringes). In order to reduce those, a Low-pass filter that blurs the picture a little bit is added on top of the sensor. Therefore, foveon pictures are way sharper, with true colors. This is the theory for colors... in fact it's a very hard to tame sensor and results can be very random. Plus the cameras are very slow because they have to process 3x more information. Sigma being a very very small company versus the other big guys, their R&D is limited. Still, it's a very nice camera to use for geeks who takes time to understand it. You hate it or love it. No in-between.
aaronbrethorst 23 hours ago [-]
Hey Devin! There's a blog called Leicaphilia written by a—sadly now passed—photographer named Timothy Vanderweert who I would argue was actually more attached to the Sigma Foveon than he was to the Leica. Kind of ironic.
I think you'd like the blog in general, but the Foveon sensor posts are definitely worth reading if you're curious about it: https://leicaphilia.com/?s=Foveon
I am working on further experimentations for the Merrill architecture.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
What improvements have you made? Processing RAW sluggishness was always an issue from de-Bayering. Before RAW, my hell was DPX image sequences. This was pre-SSD, so I/O was painful opening/closing individual frames in realtime. The best improvement of processing RAW I've experienced was NVMe SSDs.
hankbond 11 hours ago [-]
Foveons don't actually de-bayer bc they use a stacked 3-layer sensor, where each layer is sensitive to different colors. The top layer is RGB, the middle is just RG, and the bottom is just R. We calculate the three values by subtracting the layers from each other.
Traditionally all processing of these X3F RAW files had to go thru software provided by Sigma, and its clunky and bakes in some processing you can't really turn off. Some folks (myself among them) are focused on creating new ways of processing and converting these X3F files to be used more flexibly. I have some links in the threads other replies to some changes I made to one processor.
I was able to significantly improve the highlight recovery. It's kind of a game changer since the sensor architecture requires a LOT of light to get the best results. To minimize noise you expose to the right at least one stop and then pull down in post. With the new processing I am able to get pleasing results closer to +1.7 and sometimes even 2ev. This sensor was not known for having great dynamic range, but with extra processing you can tease some information out into something attractive. It does leave the upper end of specular highlights flattened compared to a proper exposure but it often looks "believable" so I'm happy with it.
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
It never ceases to amaze me the pushback to ETTR I still get to this day. Every sensor has its own limits to how much can be pushed. People just don't want to work and just shoot down the middle. My favorite quote from a lazy editor "I don't work that way" when asking why they didn't help the photog out and save some pushed exposures rather than just omitting the shots from selections.
hankbond 6 hours ago [-]
It makes sense to me if you are a mostly JPEG shooter and just keep RAWs for archiving. It also is less pleasant to look at the preview when using an EVF if its 30% blown. My photo style is often ETTL bc I like to crush shadows in a chiaroscuro kind of way. Also modern cameras look great at higher ISOs, and if you need it to be cleaner bc of large prints, AI powered de-noisers that operate on RAW files are also incredible.
One thing you can do with a raw workflow is use the EV compensation metadata to compensate the render you see. So you can shoot +1ev and then automatically reduce exposure by that much when viewing. This is a decent ETTR workflow and its never been easier to whip up a custom culling/importing tool.
That said, its basically a requirement to get proper signal-to-noise on a Merrill. The LCD-screen is dog-water anyway so its not like you can see anything of value on it other than blurry composition. So for those reasons ETTR is very natural. If you want to be extra careful you can spot meter with EV compensation , but I find the evaluative mode works pretty well enough.
soltanov 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Noaidi 2 days ago [-]
This is just depressing to me having literally grown up in a darkroom.
"For years my process looked like this: load film and take photos, ....[blah blah blah]... the exported image."
"At first this was an exciting process for me. Then as the number of rolls increased, so did my effort to do this for 36 frames per roll."
I shot black and white film sine the 70's, medium and 35mm. I would develop the negatives and prints myself. The complete process was a joy. I never printed every shot, but I put care into each shot I processed. I was careful when I took a photograph, because the cost limited how much I shot. This made me a better photographer.
I later started scanning my film with a Nikon CoolScan (this was in the late 90's) and i already started hating it. Then I started full digital and now I do not shoot anymore (I was semi professional with Art work published in national magazines).
"My part is now the part I can thoroughly enjoy, which is looking at the results I’ve snapped and finding inspiration to snap more."
Why do any of this just shoot digital if you do not care about the process?
ares623 2 days ago [-]
I agree in part, in that it is sad that this person does not have access to a darkroom. As someone who is also now shooting film and then camera scanning, I would love to have access to a darkroom. It's just a compromise film shooters have to make, and often at no fault to them. It's either too expensive (which the negatives already are), or too far away/too big to fit in modern homes, or more likely both.
We're just grateful that film is still available at all.
robotmay 1 days ago [-]
I found out that my dad managed to ram a full enlarger setup into a small bathroom before I was born. I found this out after telling him I'd managed to ram a full enlarger setup into a small bathroom. I may have to rotate on the spot in order to use the different trays and it may basically be a sauna, but I think I'm still having fun?
hankbond 2 days ago [-]
Some aspects of the process seem more like labor than a form of self-expression. I think if you are into the limitations of shooting film photos it makes sense.
sdcfgy 1 days ago [-]
As someone who printed B&W in a darkroom until last year, yeah that. My sanity seems to have been improved by selling it all and just shooting digital.
Hell I even shoot jpegs with Nikon picture control baked in now. No post editing at all.
I’m having fun again.
throwaway219450 19 hours ago [-]
Digital provides a back up for me. I’ve had negs go missing in the mail, sometimes they get damaged or scratched. So I pay for the basic scan from the lab and do it again at home. Sometimes friends will ask for a digital copy, or I need a copy for the web. I also can’t print enormous enlargements at home, so sometimes I will do a scan and (sacrilege) pay a printer to make a copy.
I don’t see how any of this detracts from the joy and presence of shooting analog, nor is it mutually exclusive with home developing and printing. Film certainly isn’t getting any cheaper either.
wkjagt 1 days ago [-]
When I showed my Konica Hexar to a younger colleague, he said, but how do you get the pictures into the computer. It was like a world opened for him when I said that I don't.
robotmay 1 days ago [-]
Urgh yeah I hate scanning as well. I finally got back to printing with an enlarger and told an elderly customer of mine at my camera stall. He just replied with "Ah, so you're finally doing _real_ photography".
I have a really basic approach to photography, I think: if the photography itself is challenging and stimulating, such as birds in flight, then I want the camera to be as capable as possible and just get out of my way. If the photography is "simple", I want the camera to be as insane and complex as humanly possible.
foldr 16 hours ago [-]
Why would you be depressed by someone else enjoying photography? No-one is stopping you from making darkroom prints yourself if it’s something that brings you joy. Selection of artistic tools and processes is an inherently personal thing. Someone might enjoy using film cameras and not enjoy doing darkroom prints (which especially for color negatives, is a very involved process). Then there’s the fact that you can’t easily share prints, so you’ll most likely have to scan the prints if you want anyone to see them.
esafak 21 hours ago [-]
> I was careful when I took a photograph, because the cost limited how much I shot. This made me a better photographer.
Professional photographers always took lots of pictures. They just editors, retouchers, and an expense account at the lab.
I went digital and I never looked back. Scanners sucked the joy out of photography.
varjag 18 hours ago [-]
Thing is scanning provided a way to share with community for the brief decade when photo clubs and magazines have died out but photo sites and forums still lived.
Nowadays photography feels utterly pointless (doubly so with advent of genAI). And oddly (non-phone) digital camera photography feels more antiquated than shooting film.
varjag 18 hours ago [-]
Seeing the Plustek scanner on his desk I was excited that he came up with some physical automation for film strip handling. Alas it's software again.
Again AI exponential curve stops where emptying the dishwasher starts.
TwoFerMaggie 17 hours ago [-]
Same tbh. I use a Plustek 8200 and the inversion and adjustments after the scan was never an issue for me. It's the 1.5-2 hour block it takes to scan a roll and having to baby it the whole time.
I was just looking into the finally released Knokke 135[1], and it seems promising as an alternative. Seems to be the only option that is both fast, has IR dust removal, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
I appreciated the dust removal, briefly tried to run a little side business scanning prints (as glossy prints is all most people have left) and slides with a mirrorless camera + macro lens and dust was one of the issues.
The other was reflections. The camera with its 80MP resolution RAW was great in general, not hard to get better results than an Epson V600 could. The slides were easy, I rigged up a little black box to keep stray light out and backlit with it with a clean source of light, but reflections on glossy prints killed the whole operation. My last idea was taking the photo at an angle so the picture would be angled toward something featureless (and preferably black) and then correcting the perspective in post, but that had the potential to introduce focus issues (my DoF with my setup was roughly 1/32") and maybe slight (probably imperceptible?) differences in resolution across the image. Tried polarizing gels over the light and lens and that reduced the problem but didn't eliminate it.
Some people on YouTube claim to pull off this feat but I think they're either tolerating slight reflections or engaging in magic.
I for one am content to be digital from the start with my images.
Edit: Oh, and keeping prints flat was another engineering undertaking. Glass introduces all kinds of variables, including megatons of dust. I settled on a DIY vacuum box system of sorts with a shop vac, lots of little holes drilled into a box to create some suction to hold a piece flat.
hutattedonmyarm 21 hours ago [-]
I find it somewhat meditative to scan and edit my 35mm strips. But I also don't very often do that, because I don't take _that_ many pictures and some of them digital. So I shoot maybe 3 rolls per year
h1fra 17 hours ago [-]
s/ Reinveting digital camera from first principle
m463 1 days ago [-]
weird, my cursor disappears over that website.
canucker2016 1 days ago [-]
website is actively setting the cursor CSS style to none.
Very user-hostile.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
It replaces the cursor with a custom one. It's not removing the default to just remove it.
m463 8 hours ago [-]
on my system it removed the cursor.
shannadige 4 hours ago [-]
Hi! I did not realize there were so many messages here until I kept getting those automated emails about my post (some grifters looking to make me money off this post, idk).
I am quite ecstatic and overwhelmed with the amount of replies, but this is exactly what forums are all about and I love it, thanks and I'm glad you found this interesting enough to share your thoughts. I wanted to share 2 more things:
1. A little story for those who think that the reason for doing film photography is redundant with this kind of "digitization" in place. The camera I have now belonged to my dad. He was born and lived in Sri Lanka for most of his childhood. Film photography there was not such a commodity as it was in the US or is it now globally. Nor, did he have access to a darkroom let alone neighborhood lab. So him being the cheapskate he was, bought this camera in the 80s and still had like a single roll for an entire year or two. The photos I have of him and information I have about his past life are very limited because of this, for example I found out just a few months ago that he had traveled to Japan and Peru during his time when he was on a shipping container, and of course he only had like 3 photos to verify this lol! When my dad settled in the States obviously he was enamored by the availability of newest and latest tech, so now he swears by digital. He even loves random youtube channels of AI Reggae and when I've been back home that's ironically all he listens to. I took this camera from him when I went off to college and I've kept it for the past 10 years or so; to me the camera has an immense sentimental value to me and keeps me close to him. Like what others have said here, film itself is a test of temptation, and being able to tell the story you want in 36 frames without any reference besides light-metering and your own eye is a good practice of creativity, patience and timing. I explained this same thing to one of my friends who was in awe at it while holding a top of the line Sony Alpha, which is an amazing camera by miles. Someone else said, and I agree, we're grateful to have film in the first place. I support my local film lab when possible, and I have the utmost respect for people who are truly analog
2. The reason I did have a LLM make this is because I am typically a very busy person with day work + freelance + daily life, and rather than mold my working behavior toward (sometimes opinionated*) open-source software, I just created software to mold to my working behavior. Unfortunately that is the route that the software industry is heading toward, where anyone can personalize an interface based on their own workflow, and I've written about that in the past. If you want to build off of this (or critique some code), I made the studio code available on Github: https://github.com/shannadige/35mm-studio - I don't expect to maintain this, so take it and run with it and I hope it helps you out. General practice is to identify a folder where you can scan negatives into, and the pipeline should take care of the rest.
nice work on the website, micro animation and the dithering effects are clean!
froh42 19 hours ago [-]
Site mouse pointer steal, site no read, site fuck off.
ravila4 2 days ago [-]
Interesting project! I scan 35mm and medium-format film with a mirrorless camera, macro lens, and Lomography film holder, then convert with Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom. I’m happy with the results, but the Lightroom subscription has me considering writing my own converter.
Could you share more about your NumPy pipeline, or publish the code? I’m particularly curious about how you use the blank film reference and roll-level measurements to handle the orange mask, color balance, and tone curves. Do you use camera/scanner calibration profiles or film-stock-specific adjustments, or estimate everything from the scans themselves?
Also, your screenshot appears to show an OpticFilm 7400. Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about.
shannadige 4 hours ago [-]
Hi!
The pipeline is configurable from the interface itself which helped me a lot on "guesstimating". I modeled my personal understanding after darktable's negadoctor feature. Takes the negative and determines a baseline, and with that come the configurations for color, light. The rolls I work with are sometimes funky and they're tinted differently, for example I have this Lomography Metropolis roll thats a bright neon vomit green. So I also needed a method of manually inputting that, so its captured as density and recorded in a library so numpy can guesstimate the right corrections that need to happen per stock.
Depending how you want to capture it can come from multiple areas, like a blank frame, the trailing* end of developed film, or the gaps in between frames. Interestingly enough along the way I was able to just skip cropping entirely so the script had some extra blank film to go off of for initial estimates.
I just uploaded the code in case you wanted to audit that: https://github.com/shannadige/35mm-studio. I know some others have suggested already-existing libraries that do this, likely better? I've not the time to test it out.
(P.S. for what its worth I found your reply very human, in contrast to most of the wording/phrasing that I let Opus do on my first pass of the blog)
(P.P.S. - OpticFilm 7400 is definitely a good starter scanner. Great output resolution for the price. I see some folks are more partial to camera scanners, but this is easy and quite portable. I got it for 200$ pretty much brand new off of Ebay. I have no intention of upgrading it so I would recommend it. It does need to be paired with good scanning software though, and I think plustek does not maintain any software for Mac. I ended up buying Vuescan a few years back, and it is pretty solid in terms of available controls.)
bbatha 2 days ago [-]
You should check out the negpy project. It in my view has the best inversion process. It claims to emulate the whole analog print chain in the inversion process. They have a fold works cited.
It also automates most of the process. It works with SANE, some other legacy scanners, and camera scanning. It can even do trichrome scans automatically.
robotmay 1 days ago [-]
I've played with this lately. I'd pair it with something like VueScan as the scanner setup is a bit lacking still, but overall it is really impressive. The only difficulty I found is coming into the terminology it uses fresh - it's quite different to most other photo software in that regard.
skort 20 hours ago [-]
How lately? They have been releasing quite frequently, and have worked a bit to clean up the UI and workflows after adding a ton of new features. I've been using it and it's working quite well for me after version 0.60-ish
robotmay 16 hours ago [-]
About a month ago I think? It didn't have enough options to run the Coolscan 4000 ED I have lying about, at least not reliably, and I don't think it had any batch options (might be wrong about that). I don't really mind going through VueScan first but I'll take a look again soon and see if that area has been improved.
bbatha 10 hours ago [-]
CoolScan support has improved a lot in the last month or so. I don't have one so I cant comment in practice, but its a very active project and I'd definitely encourage you to submit bugs if you have a coolscan.
robotmay 8 hours ago [-]
Ooh great I'll check it out. I have a couple of them actually, although I couldn't seem to get one working through the complex series of adapters I had, so I'm gonna set up a new machine with an actual FireWire card and reassess it then. I do at least have one that works in VueScan so I can at least provide some feedback (it's a modded 4000 ED that does whole rolls).
chickensong 1 days ago [-]
Thank you!
ravila4 2 days ago [-]
To reiterate, those were legit questions. I used voice dictation to my phone, with an app that transcribed and formatted my message.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
A colorist I worked with did something similar by using reference film stock of the same film that was being scanned. This was anime 16mm film prints from the 80s that had been scanned multiple times and color set on arbitrary decisions by who ever was working with the film at the time. After using the reference stock to base decisions, the director said it was the closest he had seen to what he wanted.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
dekhn 2 days ago [-]
It is a very sensible and reasonable comment- literally all questions I'd want to ask to replicate the setup, in a format that's easy to parse. If the author did use LLM it did not substantially alter the content of their question.
EvanAnderson 2 days ago [-]
I thought it was a reasonable comment and, like you, I thought they were good questions. I haven't followed what kind of watermarking LLMs are putting in their output that might be a telltale for their use so maybe it's readily apparent in a way that isn't to me.
I'd be mortified if a comment I made was accused of being LLM-edited or "created". I don't use any of that junk but if I'm reading LLM output and not realizing it I just might be adopting some of its mannerisms and styles with realizing it. That's chilling.
dekhn 1 days ago [-]
I ended up discussing it with the moderators and they interpret "transcribe and formatting" as contributing enough that they want to "educate" the user to not do that.
In my mind, using an LLM to lightly format a legitimate questions falls below any threshold I'd apply to AI-written writing. I often dictate HN messages to my phone, and in my case, personally edit the message (tediously), but if there was a tool that produced text that looked lightly LLM, I wouldn't care about it at all.
It's not a big deal because in five years, the idea of chiding a user for using an LLM to enhance their text is going to be considered ridiculous. I've lived through enough computer revolutions to know this; once, I didn't get a job (in ~1989) because I could type 80wpm but made a bunch of errors... on a typewriter! The agency told me they needed people who could type 80wpm on a typewriter.
ssl-3 2 days ago [-]
For whatever it's worth: It's definitely phrased a bit strangely but it passes my own sniff test. If they really are using a dictation-oriented method for getting text into a box (as they wrote in a followup reply to themself) then that may adequately explain the strangeness.
There was a time when scanning and [photographic] printing of 35mm film negatives was what I did for a living; it's likely that I've touched more film than most people ever will. I think they're asking questions that are a good combination of solid, thoughtful, and practical.
black_knight 1 days ago [-]
I can see why this comment would trigger people's AI alarm, especially if it fits a pattern for this user. The questions seem legit at first glance, but completely uninteresting. Too general and specific at the same time, if you see what I mean.
tptacek 2 days ago [-]
I don't know what indicators HN is using but Pangram says this is AI text.
dekhn 2 days ago [-]
Who cares? The comment stands on its merit.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Not on HN; generated comments are against the guidelines here.
dekhn 1 days ago [-]
It wasn't a generated comment at all! Read the comment, and then what the author wrote elsewhere saying they spoke it into their phone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49948614
"To reiterate, those were legit questions. I used voice dictation to my phone, with an app that transcribed and formatted my message."
harassing a user for doing that is just unncessary and I dont't think it violates the site's guidelines. Further, the comment itself was high quality, and contributed to the discussion.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
This is not a hill I'm interested dying on but I don't understand how voice dictation and transcription is setting off Pangram like that.
dekhn 1 days ago [-]
It's not a hill I want to die on either, ultimately the moderators run the site and make the rules and we comply with them at their pleasure.
dang believes that the "transcription and formatting" adds a signature. I entered into Gemini Pro (at the highest level of reasoning) and it calls it human written text and provides a far more detailed description of why:
"If an LLM was used here, it was likely just used as a grammar checker or "polisher" rather than a generator. If we had to flag anything, it would be this section:... .his reads like a standard, high-quality comment from a technical forum like Hacker News or Reddit's r/analog. If the user utilized an LLM, they likely wrote the entire comment themselves and merely passed it through a tool like Grammarly or ChatGPT with a prompt like "Fix my typos" without letting it change their voice or vocabulary."
I tried ChatGPT and Claude (all the most recent models I have access to) and they all agree: human text, slightly modified to be more readable.
Looking at Pangram's output, it only mentioned the last sentence as AI generated:
"Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about."
That's absolutely a sentence a human expert might write. Even if it wasn't, the content contributes to the discussion. Seriously, why would grammar checkers for voice dictation even be remotely an issue?
ravila4 1 days ago [-]
I used voice dictation to transcribe my rambling thoughts on the article, which was thereafter re-arranged into a still verbose but somewhat more coherent reply. I should have taken the time to reword it properly - my laziness is on me.
I was not aware the rule against AI-assited text at the time, and will be more careful next time. Nonetheless, I find it unfortunate that we've spend more time talking about AI usage in a comment, than the blog which prompted it.
dang 1 days ago [-]
In case it helps at all: I post that type of reply (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) precisely when the commenter is a good contributor who we don't want to get dinged by HN's software. Usually it turns out that people weren't aware of the rule (as was the case here).
(I've marked the subthread offtopic and collapsed it now)
akerl_ 1 days ago [-]
It seems most plausible if “formatted” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.
dekhn 2 days ago [-]
Dang, would you reconsider your message here? I think it was uncalled for and chilling to legitmate discourse.
mattz56 2 days ago [-]
I don't have a public writeup, but the general approach for orange mask removal is: scan a blank unexposed frame from the same roll, take its per-channel mean as your reference white, then divide each pixel by that reference per channel before doing anything else. That normalizes the mask out instead of trying to subtract a fixed color. After that, a per-roll linear stretch (black point from the darkest scanned frame, white point from the lightest) gets you a rough base. Tone curve is the hard part: NLP uses a nonlinear S-curve tuned per stock, and matching that from scratch means a lot of trial and error with reference images you know the expected look of. If you want a quick win before rewriting things, Lightroom lets you write develop settings to XMP so you're not locked into the catalog even if you cancel later; the actual RAW/TIFF processing engine is what needs a subscription, not the metadata.
ravila4 1 days ago [-]
Thanks, this is helpful!
soltanov 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
peachyj001 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 03:01:43 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Also the mouse take-over is no bueno on the site. And some of the fonts are really grainy.
The wide variety of form factors keeps things interesting. Yesterday I went to shoot a sunrise, and I took a panoramic 6x17, a pinhole 6x12, and my TLR (which I didn’t shoot) at 6x6.
Everything about shooting film is more deliberate. Simply loading a medium format is typically time-consuming, developing the negatives, and if you’re lucky enough to have access to an enlarger, creating your own prints is very satisfying.
Slow but rewarding.
And I spend all day in front of a computer; it’s nice to have a very analog hobby.
There is also something to creating a physical thing that is immensely satisfying. Bits are bits and no matter how useful they may be they end up feeling very much the same as ever other undifferentiated bit in the trillions of photos, sounds, programs, spreadsheets, etc. Capturing light on film and then splashing them with chemicals results in something that you hold in your hand and now is a unique object.
So yes, digital photography is very useful and cost effective. Film photography is about fun or challenging yourself. It causes you to practice deliberate decision making in a creative process. If that sounds meaningless or stupid then it isn’t for you.
Exactly. As someone who DJs (I know - the most low-skill hobby in existence), beatmatching by ear rather than using computer displays is helpful because it teaches you to listen to the music you're playing and how your mix sounds (the main output of DJing) rather than doing something because a screen says it's optimal.
Also a bit sick of having thousands of photos that I'll never get around to curating into anything worth my time looking back on. They all just get dumped on an external hard drive and never looked back on.
RE: the cost it can be cheap enough. B&W is very easy to develop at home for not much and if you get a half frame camera you can get 72 shots from a single roll which can take an incredibly long amount of time to get through.
Only if you’re a nerd that thinks in terms of data collection. Some film stocks produce beautiful images that aren’t easy to emulate. Why paint or draw with graphite when you have an inkjet?
From a utilitarian, “f/8 and be there” perspective, my iPhone today is way way better. I always have it with me and it handles pretty much any light condition I encounter, including near darkness.
And I took a 4/3 mirrorless digital body with a zoom lens to Africa recently, and got tons of sharp, well-exposed photos of wildlife.
But a slide is a picture, in a literal physical way. There’s no format or device needed. I hand it to anyone, and they can hold it up to a light and see the picture. It is a piece of art the way a sculpture is a piece of art; it embodies itself. I can keep it like a book, hand it over, pass it on. That is very cool, and looking through my old slides is satisfying to me in a way that opening up my laptop and scrolling through pixels is not.
Why even put it in terms of ‘nostalgia’? When someone takes up watercolor painting, do you also dismiss this as ‘nostalgia’? Why is film photography as a hobby any less interesting or legitimate on its own merits than making pottery the way it was made 10.000 years ago?
I often find it’s an older (even elderly) crowd that dismisses film-photography in this way. They maybe shot film when they were younger, discovered digital (which they always describe as being “objectively superior” - as though two totally different media can be compared this way), and then dismiss film users as somehow deluded ‘hipsters’ or as people merely indulging in nostalgia.
In my case, as someone who took up film photography 15 years ago, and shoot it alongside digital, I find film not only a more satisfying and thoughtful process, but also a superior artistic artifact: I prefer film’s color, the subtle ways that film handles highlight falloff, and even the ‘accidents’ that happen when chemical and light fuse to create an image.
Incidentally there are more and more ways to enjoy the entire process without a darkroom nowadays: a changing bag and a unit like the AGO film processor from Vintage Visual [0] make it simple to just take out and pack away all that’s needed to go from photograph to scan and print without a lot of space or mass of hassle.
[0] https://vintagevisual.eu/products/ago-film-processor
Which is only important if all you care about is a straight line towards perfection. But imperfections can make a work interesting and spark creativity.
> I can be doing group photos at a festival and review the photos I just took
That’s a feature for you, but for many it’s a bug. Friction matters. You can remove friction or add friction to change your behaviour and thus your outcome.
You seem to derive satisfaction from getting as good a photo as you can get straight away. Perhaps you even delete ones which look “wrong”. But other people prefer to carry on with the moment instead of pausing it to review what they just did. Whatever the photo will be, it will be, they don’t even think about it anymore until it’s time to get the film developed and relive the memories at that point. And because they had to make choices (film is expensive) they pay much more attention to each photo and appreciate it on a different level even if someone had their eyes closed.
There’s no right or wrong here, to each their own.
1. The nostalgia comes from a few things, one of which is the nostalgia for the time and place where film was common, rather than for the film itself, the film becomes a hallmark or totem.
2. Kind of, but also not really. Besides the fact that there are many formats of film, it's possible to get >800 lp/mm of resolution in some films, and the best color films were in excess of 150 lp/mm. Even thinking about lp/mm obscures what film does, because with any analog format (this isn't just limited to photography), falloff outside of the resolving power of the medium is done on gradual curves, as film doesn't have "pixels". To a close approximation, it's only within the last 3-4 years that digital cameras have achieved equivalent resolution to color films, and they /still/ don't achieve equivalent resolution to fine art black and white films at full frame (35mm) size. Additionally, film and digital are fundamentally different not just in capture, but in expression. Digital images are emissive, while printed images are reflective, that is when you look at an image on your screen that image has uniform brightness defined by the backlight of the display and limited in color reproduction by its CRI and gamut, when you look at a printed image the brightness and color reproduction is limited by the print process and the room lighting, looking at a printed image under studio lighting, gallery lighting, or in sunlight has a higher perceptual quality than any digital image on any screen. Does that mean film is better than digital? No, not at all. You can print digital images too, and they will look better printed at high quality than they do on your screen when under good lighting conditions.
I primarily shoot digital these days, although I do occasionally use a 4x5 or medium format film camera. Having tried digital backs for medium format, I can strongly say that once you get outside of full frame, digital still has a long way to go to match the quality of film.
This is one of those cases where its a means-to-an-end (I just want to take more photos without being bogged down) and less of a project for me to learn how to reverse-engineer and design signal processing pipelines. I am very grateful for what recent models are enabling me to do.
I did not start this project but here are some changes I cooked up, some are seeking parity and some are net-new. https://github.com/sagwaco/x3fuse-core/pull/23 https://github.com/hank-bond/x3fuse-core/pull/7
I am currently working on recreating more aspects of classic X3F processing and it's looking like the future of Foveon is very bright.
I think you'd like the blog in general, but the Foveon sensor posts are definitely worth reading if you're curious about it: https://leicaphilia.com/?s=Foveon
Also, I think this entry from a friend of his about his photographic monograph, Car Sick, is worth reading: https://leicaphilia.com/car-sick-the-view-from-the-man-on-th... — happy to lend it to you if you ever want to see it firsthand.
I did not start this project but here are some changes I cooked up https://github.com/sagwaco/x3fuse-core/pull/23 https://github.com/hank-bond/x3fuse-core/pull/7
I am working on further experimentations for the Merrill architecture.
Traditionally all processing of these X3F RAW files had to go thru software provided by Sigma, and its clunky and bakes in some processing you can't really turn off. Some folks (myself among them) are focused on creating new ways of processing and converting these X3F files to be used more flexibly. I have some links in the threads other replies to some changes I made to one processor.
I was able to significantly improve the highlight recovery. It's kind of a game changer since the sensor architecture requires a LOT of light to get the best results. To minimize noise you expose to the right at least one stop and then pull down in post. With the new processing I am able to get pleasing results closer to +1.7 and sometimes even 2ev. This sensor was not known for having great dynamic range, but with extra processing you can tease some information out into something attractive. It does leave the upper end of specular highlights flattened compared to a proper exposure but it often looks "believable" so I'm happy with it.
One thing you can do with a raw workflow is use the EV compensation metadata to compensate the render you see. So you can shoot +1ev and then automatically reduce exposure by that much when viewing. This is a decent ETTR workflow and its never been easier to whip up a custom culling/importing tool.
That said, its basically a requirement to get proper signal-to-noise on a Merrill. The LCD-screen is dog-water anyway so its not like you can see anything of value on it other than blurry composition. So for those reasons ETTR is very natural. If you want to be extra careful you can spot meter with EV compensation , but I find the evaluative mode works pretty well enough.
"For years my process looked like this: load film and take photos, ....[blah blah blah]... the exported image."
"At first this was an exciting process for me. Then as the number of rolls increased, so did my effort to do this for 36 frames per roll."
I shot black and white film sine the 70's, medium and 35mm. I would develop the negatives and prints myself. The complete process was a joy. I never printed every shot, but I put care into each shot I processed. I was careful when I took a photograph, because the cost limited how much I shot. This made me a better photographer.
I later started scanning my film with a Nikon CoolScan (this was in the late 90's) and i already started hating it. Then I started full digital and now I do not shoot anymore (I was semi professional with Art work published in national magazines).
"My part is now the part I can thoroughly enjoy, which is looking at the results I’ve snapped and finding inspiration to snap more."
Why do any of this just shoot digital if you do not care about the process?
We're just grateful that film is still available at all.
Hell I even shoot jpegs with Nikon picture control baked in now. No post editing at all.
I’m having fun again.
I don’t see how any of this detracts from the joy and presence of shooting analog, nor is it mutually exclusive with home developing and printing. Film certainly isn’t getting any cheaper either.
I have a really basic approach to photography, I think: if the photography itself is challenging and stimulating, such as birds in flight, then I want the camera to be as capable as possible and just get out of my way. If the photography is "simple", I want the camera to be as insane and complex as humanly possible.
Professional photographers always took lots of pictures. They just editors, retouchers, and an expense account at the lab.
I went digital and I never looked back. Scanners sucked the joy out of photography.
Nowadays photography feels utterly pointless (doubly so with advent of genAI). And oddly (non-phone) digital camera photography feels more antiquated than shooting film.
Again AI exponential curve stops where emptying the dishwasher starts.
I was just looking into the finally released Knokke 135[1], and it seems promising as an alternative. Seems to be the only option that is both fast, has IR dust removal, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
[1] https://soke.engineering/knokke
The other was reflections. The camera with its 80MP resolution RAW was great in general, not hard to get better results than an Epson V600 could. The slides were easy, I rigged up a little black box to keep stray light out and backlit with it with a clean source of light, but reflections on glossy prints killed the whole operation. My last idea was taking the photo at an angle so the picture would be angled toward something featureless (and preferably black) and then correcting the perspective in post, but that had the potential to introduce focus issues (my DoF with my setup was roughly 1/32") and maybe slight (probably imperceptible?) differences in resolution across the image. Tried polarizing gels over the light and lens and that reduced the problem but didn't eliminate it.
Some people on YouTube claim to pull off this feat but I think they're either tolerating slight reflections or engaging in magic.
I for one am content to be digital from the start with my images.
Edit: Oh, and keeping prints flat was another engineering undertaking. Glass introduces all kinds of variables, including megatons of dust. I settled on a DIY vacuum box system of sorts with a shop vac, lots of little holes drilled into a box to create some suction to hold a piece flat.
Very user-hostile.
I am quite ecstatic and overwhelmed with the amount of replies, but this is exactly what forums are all about and I love it, thanks and I'm glad you found this interesting enough to share your thoughts. I wanted to share 2 more things:
1. A little story for those who think that the reason for doing film photography is redundant with this kind of "digitization" in place. The camera I have now belonged to my dad. He was born and lived in Sri Lanka for most of his childhood. Film photography there was not such a commodity as it was in the US or is it now globally. Nor, did he have access to a darkroom let alone neighborhood lab. So him being the cheapskate he was, bought this camera in the 80s and still had like a single roll for an entire year or two. The photos I have of him and information I have about his past life are very limited because of this, for example I found out just a few months ago that he had traveled to Japan and Peru during his time when he was on a shipping container, and of course he only had like 3 photos to verify this lol! When my dad settled in the States obviously he was enamored by the availability of newest and latest tech, so now he swears by digital. He even loves random youtube channels of AI Reggae and when I've been back home that's ironically all he listens to. I took this camera from him when I went off to college and I've kept it for the past 10 years or so; to me the camera has an immense sentimental value to me and keeps me close to him. Like what others have said here, film itself is a test of temptation, and being able to tell the story you want in 36 frames without any reference besides light-metering and your own eye is a good practice of creativity, patience and timing. I explained this same thing to one of my friends who was in awe at it while holding a top of the line Sony Alpha, which is an amazing camera by miles. Someone else said, and I agree, we're grateful to have film in the first place. I support my local film lab when possible, and I have the utmost respect for people who are truly analog
2. The reason I did have a LLM make this is because I am typically a very busy person with day work + freelance + daily life, and rather than mold my working behavior toward (sometimes opinionated*) open-source software, I just created software to mold to my working behavior. Unfortunately that is the route that the software industry is heading toward, where anyone can personalize an interface based on their own workflow, and I've written about that in the past. If you want to build off of this (or critique some code), I made the studio code available on Github: https://github.com/shannadige/35mm-studio - I don't expect to maintain this, so take it and run with it and I hope it helps you out. General practice is to identify a folder where you can scan negatives into, and the pipeline should take care of the rest.
- blog page dont work
Could you share more about your NumPy pipeline, or publish the code? I’m particularly curious about how you use the blank film reference and roll-level measurements to handle the orange mask, color balance, and tone curves. Do you use camera/scanner calibration profiles or film-stock-specific adjustments, or estimate everything from the scans themselves?
Also, your screenshot appears to show an OpticFilm 7400. Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about.
The pipeline is configurable from the interface itself which helped me a lot on "guesstimating". I modeled my personal understanding after darktable's negadoctor feature. Takes the negative and determines a baseline, and with that come the configurations for color, light. The rolls I work with are sometimes funky and they're tinted differently, for example I have this Lomography Metropolis roll thats a bright neon vomit green. So I also needed a method of manually inputting that, so its captured as density and recorded in a library so numpy can guesstimate the right corrections that need to happen per stock.
Depending how you want to capture it can come from multiple areas, like a blank frame, the trailing* end of developed film, or the gaps in between frames. Interestingly enough along the way I was able to just skip cropping entirely so the script had some extra blank film to go off of for initial estimates.
I just uploaded the code in case you wanted to audit that: https://github.com/shannadige/35mm-studio. I know some others have suggested already-existing libraries that do this, likely better? I've not the time to test it out.
(P.S. for what its worth I found your reply very human, in contrast to most of the wording/phrasing that I let Opus do on my first pass of the blog)
(P.P.S. - OpticFilm 7400 is definitely a good starter scanner. Great output resolution for the price. I see some folks are more partial to camera scanners, but this is easy and quite portable. I got it for 200$ pretty much brand new off of Ebay. I have no intention of upgrading it so I would recommend it. It does need to be paired with good scanning software though, and I think plustek does not maintain any software for Mac. I ended up buying Vuescan a few years back, and it is pretty solid in terms of available controls.)
It also automates most of the process. It works with SANE, some other legacy scanners, and camera scanning. It can even do trichrome scans automatically.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
I'd be mortified if a comment I made was accused of being LLM-edited or "created". I don't use any of that junk but if I'm reading LLM output and not realizing it I just might be adopting some of its mannerisms and styles with realizing it. That's chilling.
In my mind, using an LLM to lightly format a legitimate questions falls below any threshold I'd apply to AI-written writing. I often dictate HN messages to my phone, and in my case, personally edit the message (tediously), but if there was a tool that produced text that looked lightly LLM, I wouldn't care about it at all.
It's not a big deal because in five years, the idea of chiding a user for using an LLM to enhance their text is going to be considered ridiculous. I've lived through enough computer revolutions to know this; once, I didn't get a job (in ~1989) because I could type 80wpm but made a bunch of errors... on a typewriter! The agency told me they needed people who could type 80wpm on a typewriter.
There was a time when scanning and [photographic] printing of 35mm film negatives was what I did for a living; it's likely that I've touched more film than most people ever will. I think they're asking questions that are a good combination of solid, thoughtful, and practical.
"To reiterate, those were legit questions. I used voice dictation to my phone, with an app that transcribed and formatted my message."
harassing a user for doing that is just unncessary and I dont't think it violates the site's guidelines. Further, the comment itself was high quality, and contributed to the discussion.
dang believes that the "transcription and formatting" adds a signature. I entered into Gemini Pro (at the highest level of reasoning) and it calls it human written text and provides a far more detailed description of why: "If an LLM was used here, it was likely just used as a grammar checker or "polisher" rather than a generator. If we had to flag anything, it would be this section:... .his reads like a standard, high-quality comment from a technical forum like Hacker News or Reddit's r/analog. If the user utilized an LLM, they likely wrote the entire comment themselves and merely passed it through a tool like Grammarly or ChatGPT with a prompt like "Fix my typos" without letting it change their voice or vocabulary."
I tried ChatGPT and Claude (all the most recent models I have access to) and they all agree: human text, slightly modified to be more readable.
Looking at Pangram's output, it only mentioned the last sentence as AI generated:
"Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about."
That's absolutely a sentence a human expert might write. Even if it wasn't, the content contributes to the discussion. Seriously, why would grammar checkers for voice dictation even be remotely an issue?
I was not aware the rule against AI-assited text at the time, and will be more careful next time. Nonetheless, I find it unfortunate that we've spend more time talking about AI usage in a comment, than the blog which prompted it.
(I've marked the subthread offtopic and collapsed it now)