Film scanning on a budget
For a couple of years I paid the lab to scan my rolls. The scans were fine, but small, and the colours were always someone else's idea of what the picture should look like. This winter I finally set up "camera scanning" at home. Here is what I ended up with and what I would skip.
The setup
- Camera: the digital body I already had. Any reasonably modern sensor is enough for 35mm.
- Lens: a used 60mm macro that does 1:1. This is the one thing worth spending money on.
- Light: a small LED panel sold for tracing drawings. Look for a high CRI rating; the cheapest ones have a green tint that is hard to remove later.
- Holder: a simple plastic negative holder that keeps the strip flat. Flatness matters more than I thought.
- Stand: an old copy stand from a second-hand shop. A tripod with a horizontal arm works too, but levelling it is a pain.
Settings
Manual focus with magnification on the screen, aperture around f/8, base ISO, and a two-second timer so pressing the shutter doesn't shake anything. I shoot RAW and lock the white balance on the empty film base between frames, so every frame in a roll starts from the same point.
Turning negatives into pictures
This is where most of the time goes. Inverting colour negatives by hand in an editor is possible, but the orange mask makes it fiddly, and every frame ends up slightly different. I tried a couple of tools that do the inversion automatically and settled on one that lets me sync the settings across a whole roll. Black and white is much easier: invert, set the black and white points, done.
Dust
Dust is the enemy. A rocket blower before every strip, cotton gloves, and scanning in the evening after the room has been still for a while helped more than any software clean-up.
Was it worth it?
Yes. The files are much bigger than the lab scans, and I like being in control of the colour. It takes about forty minutes per roll including editing, which is fine for the amount I shoot. If you already own a camera, the macro lens is the only real cost.