Digitising 35mm film

As a hybrid photographer I mainly use film cameras for my photography and then either print in the darkroom or digitise the negatives to enable me to “print in the Lightroom” as it were. This latter is particularly necessary for quickly sharing images on social media or for illustrating blog posts. I could print everything in the darkroom but I’d still need to scan the prints for sharing online.

I have no problem with the hybrid workflow. Some purists will deride it but I enjoy both the traditional and the more recently developed film/digital workflows. Realistically I also get more opportunities for working in the lightroom compared to the darkroom.

With it being a big part, especially of my blog posts, I thought I’d share a quick overview of how I digitise 35mm negatives. I use different workflows for different formats and this method is used just for “normal” 35mm negatives and not for my panoramic work using the Horizon S3 Pro or KMZ FT-2 for example.

Stage 1 – creating the RAW files

I use a Fuji X-H1 digital camera on a copy stand. The lens is an old Nikkor macro lens and the light source is a Kaiser slimlite plano. When copying colour negatives I have a custom white balance set to ensure the base colour of the negatives are not compromised. An Essential Film Holder and cable release complete the set-up (see above).

In my experience, care and attention here can save lots of time later when working on the computer (my least favourite aspect). I ensure that each negative fills the digital frame (it helps they are the same 3×2 format) and that they are accurately focused. It’s a manual lens but focus-peaking on the Fuji is a godsend.

The first frame I copy is always the leader of the film on which I’ve written the reference number for that roll. This identifies the negatives later when importing to the computer and I can also use the leader to set the white balance across the whole roll in Lightroom in a later stage.

Stage 2 – some housekeeping basics

I keep a written record in a notebook (yes – old school!) of every film I use containing details of the camera and developer at the very least and generally lots of other details. I assign a reference number to each. The format is generally roll number|year|camera|film|file number. So 051-2024-Canon EOS300-Kodak5399VNexpired-0346, for example which enables me to tell at a glance what I’m looking at. I save each set of files in a unique folder for that roll, so 051-2024, for example. Slightly nerdy perhaps but with film photography keeping notes of what you did can be helpful later when deciding which developer worked best for example.

So, negatives copied, files renamed and imported into a unique folder. I’m now ready to convert the files and as I’ve already intimated this is my least favourite part of the operation.

Stage 3 – Lightroom and Negative Lab Pro (NLP)

With the files all imported into Lightroom the first job is to set a custom white balance for the whole roll. This step is needed for NLP to do its work. I use the first frame for this purpose and use the Sync function in Lightroom to ensure that every file is treated the same. I then work through the files one by one, ensuring they are the correct way round and cropping out anything that isn’t part of the image – this is where careful copying in stage 1 saves me loads of time, if I’ve framed them correctly there is nothing to crop out.

With each file dealt with I select all of the negatives (I exclude the leader as it’s done its job) and convert the images using NLP. As I’ve mentioned before I’m very new to NLP and no where near qualified to elaborate at this point.

I then export the full set of converted negatives to the cloud from where I can access them via my tablet or desktop computer to finish off.

Once I’m more comfortable with this stage of the process I will do a more detailed post to share my methodology.

Stage 4 – finishing touches

At the moment I’m generally using Snapseed on my tablet for finishing touches and subsequent uploading to social media etcetera. For important images I do use Lightroom and Photoshop on my desktop computer and it is my intention to do more of this in the future, especially as I learn more about using NLP. For now though Snapseed works for me!

Conclusion

So, there we have it. An outline of my approach to digitising 35mm negatives, particularly colour ones. I do not use NLP for my black and white images, the capture via the Fuji outlined in Stage 1 is the same as is the housekeeping element(stage 2) but I then omit Stage 3 apart from using Lightroom to export copies to the cloud.