How I Scan Film
Scanning film with a digital camera is, with a bit of practice, a quick and efficient process that is rising in popularity.
Photography has exploded in the digital age with countless websites such as Instagram and Flickr allowing millions to share their pictures with people all over the world. A far cry from the old days of sitting down with your relatives and handing round small 6x4 prints from your holiday. To enable people to see your photos taken on film they need to be scanned and digitised so they too can be widely shared. This can be done in three different ways: the traditional method of using a flatbed scanner, the most involved method of using a drum scanner or the newest method rising in popularity – scanning with a digital camera. That is what I do, and I will explain how I do it.
First, it is worth mentioning that to get the best results you need to scan the original negative/slide and not a print of the image. The setup is straight forward, you will have the camera on a tripod facing down onto the negative that sits in a holder and is backlit from behind. Backlighting ensures the negative is properly and evenly lit and the holder ensures that it sits flat to the ground, as any bends will cause areas of the scan to be out of focus and produce a blurry image.
The Essential Film Holder is a well designed piece of kit at an affordable price. Coupled with a cheap LED light panel, you will have a great setup for holding your strips of film flat with even lighting for scanning.
For backlighting I use a cheap light panel that artists would use for tracing drawings. Any LED light panel will do if as long as it produces even light, you don’t want the individual LEDs visible to the naked eye as this will produce ugly highlight spots on your scans. The holder I used is a new product released in 2020 as a lockdown project for its creator - the Essential Film Holder. It works with both 35mm and 120 film (up to 6x9) and allows you to push through strips of film to be completely flat between plastic sheets which will not scratch the negatives the same way a metal holder might. There are also additional accessories that can be purchased to hold individual slides or even to scan X-PAN. Based in the UK but with worldwide shipping this is a cheap and effective way to get started if you already own a digital camera. The product is well designed, down to its translucent white base which helps produce the desired even lighting. It can be purchased here: https://clifforth.co.uk/.
My complete setup. Having a Tripod where you can invert the column makes the task of scanning film much easier. In addition you can use a remote shutter release, but I mostly stick to the self timer on the camera itself.
With your negatives in place you just need to setup your camera on a tripod, any digital camera will do (but the higher the megapixel count the higher the resolution you will get from your scans). You will need to use a macro lens, preferably a 105mm macro on a full frame camera or its equivalent for a crop body. This will allow you to fill the frame with the negative and maximise the quality you are able to extract. You want to set your aperture to something small like F8 or F11 so that you can guarantee everything will be in focus and then put your ISO down to its lowest native setting (likely 64 or 100 depending on your camera). Set an appropriate shutter speed and then you are ready. Make sure to wipe away as much dust as possible from the holder and the film strips using a microfibre cloth.
Originally I made the mistake of setting my focus once and then flipping my lens to manual to lock focus, however even though I then only moved the holder rather than the camera, it resulted in the focus being off on a lot of shots. It is much better practice to leave autofocus on and re-focus for each shot. Use either the built-in timer on your camera or a remote release (cable or app) to minimise any camera shake and if you are using a DSLR do not forget to use mirror lock-up.
One of my original, poor quality scans. Notice how the eyes of the tiger on the left hand side are not in focus. Attempting to acquire focus once and then locking it in manual for several scans is not a very successful method.
With a bit of practice, you should be able to scan images much faster than with a traditional flatbed scanner as you will take a shot, push the strip of film forward to the next image and then rinse and repeat until the entire roll has finished. As I use a Nikon D850 my camera has a neat trick up its sleeve (only shared with newer Nikon D780) that has software built-in to invert film negatives for scanning in both colour and black & white. This removes the need for post-processing to get a positive image. In my experience this software works well as long as you fill the frame and minimise the surrounding blank areas on the strip, including too much of these can give the final image a strange colour cast (normally green or magenta). This has proved more difficult for scanning my 6x6 medium format negatives as they have a different aspect ratio to my digital sensor.
The D850’s handy Negative Digitizer allows you to scan negatives as a positive image straight out of the camera.
If you do not have a Nikon D850/D780 then you can invert the colours manually using the individual RGB tone curves in Lightroom or Photoshop, or through the usage of additional third-party software such as Negative Lab Pro. For more information on the former see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy7c2ikUhcM
Slide film will not require any of this as it is already a positive image.
The final result of a high quality scan. The eyes of the tiger on the left are now in focus and there is a lot more detail for both animals.
Shot at F2.8 1/400s 300mm on Kodak Portra 160
The Negative Digitizer of the Nikon D850 also allows you to scan as a black & white, though the conversion can easily be done in software such as Lightroom.
That is all there is to it. Once you have your scans you can crop them on your computer to remove any borders, and then you are good to go to share them online or with friends or family. It’s up to you how much more digital editing you want to do but make sure to remove any dust spots which will leave nasty white marks across the image.
How do you scan your film? Is there anything you do that I have missed? Let me know in the comments below.
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