Last week I described my experience of learning to develop colour film and the ease at which I found the process to be. However, developing film at home is only half of the process. It's the wet part of the process and, for those of us without access to a dark room, the wet process ends with our film hanging up in the bathroom to dry. The dry end of processing our film begins when we scan our film into our computers.
There are several ways we can scan our film. You can ask your local friendly lab to scan it for you, use a flat bed scaner such as the Epson V800 with software and there's DSLR repro photography, commonly called "DSLR Scanning". All will produce high quality digital files. Or you can do it the way I did with a cheap Ion Slides2PC 35mm film and slides scanner I bought from a local electronics retailer in a half price sale a few years ago.
The Ion Slides2PC 35mm slide and roll film scanner is basically a phone camera in a box with a slot for a film mask that slips into the housing over a small led light box at the bottom. There's nothing fancy about it other than the electronics insde it that operates the camera and links to a basic user interface you download onto your computer. It's incredibly easy to use and has some basic adjustments to brightness and colour. I don't tend to make too many adjustments as the default image it produces is pretty good.
Once I am happy I press the button on the top and it takes a 5mp jpeg photo. The software can interpolate that to 10mp, but I don't do that. 5mp is enough for posting to social media and the interpolation process adds unwanted noise to the image. I then save the scans, 12 at a time, to the folder I created for the film. Easy peasy!
The next step is opening the jpegs in Affinity Photo to begin the editing process. As I said, the default colour profile my scanner has is pretty good, but I do like to use the auto levels, contrast, colour and white balance in Affinity Photo to tweak my images. I have lab scanned files of Kodak ColorPlus and Gold to refer to and it seems to match up pretty well. Mostly the auto levels will fix exposure and the rest is fine.
Then I set to work removing the blemishes and scratches that home developed film inevitably has. No matter how clean we are there's always dust and/or water spots or a scratch from handling the film. Some folk prefer to leave the spots and scratches alone to have that authentic film look, but not me. I like to tidy my shots up to present them as best as I can. Once I am happy with the image I save it and also save the affinity file in case I want to edit the image a little differently in the future.
That's my workflow with the gear I have available to me. It's an inexpensive way into home scanning for folks who may not have a DSLR or a flat bed scanner. It's even cheaper if you use any of the free photo editors that are available. I bought the Ion Slides2PC scanner before I bought my Nikon D90 in 2017 and even then it was cheaper than a macro lens. One day I will move to DSLR scanning, but this method has served me well and if it aint broke, why fix it?
Nothing will ever beat a high quality lab scan on a Fuji Frontier or a Noritsu scanner. Those machines are built to high standards and produce superb high definition film scans. You can even go crazy and have a lab drum scan your film, medium and large format users will tell you how great a drum scan is. For the budding home developer who doesn't have a lot of disosable income the system I have outlined here is a good a place to start as you learn to develop and scan film.
I can do DSLR scans using my Nikon D90 or D700, my 50mm f/1.8 and an extension tube over a Pixl-Latr and an A5 light pad, but for speed I will always reach for my Ion Slides2PC scanner. I can get a higher quality image with the DSLR method if I want to print it, but for a long time I didn't have that option open to me. Photography doesn't have to be expensive, sometimes cheap and cheerful is all you need.
Next week I will be talking about my Frugal Film Project roll of Kodak ColorPlus that I developed and scanned at home. Until then here's a few shots from a roll of Kodak Gold I shot recently. I had fun going through the process of shooting, developing and scanning it and I have placed the images in an album on Flickr for you to see in full resolution. I hope you enjoy them.
Flickr Kodak Gold Olympus OM-2
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