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Film negatives to jpegs without film scanner

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Uploaded by on Jan 2, 2009

I have a scanner, but it's not capable of scanning film, so I searched around the internet looking for solutions. I came upon one site that mentioned getting jpgs from film negatives by using any digital camera. Intrigued and extremely skeptical, I decided to give it a shot.

The results are shown in this video.

For images that are difficult to color, I just use the "black & white" option and lower the blue tones. I also find messing with the color balance to help.

More of these images can be found on my Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shima-ken/collections/72157611974864493/


User comment:
Hello ~ I noticed that when you clicked the auto levels function the blue tint completely disappeared! However, when I tried it on photoshop the blue tint pretty much remained present... Then I realised my problem! ~ You cut your picture out, whereas I inverted my image that contained the film sprockets. The film sprockets turned black with the invertion which in turn prevented auto levels from removing the blue tint since it treated black as a major color balance source!

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  • absolute genius!!!

  • questionable music

  • Wet the negative with water, you should get better results.

  • You sir, are a hero! Thanks for sharing this! :)

  • Nice job man. Simple solution to a simple problem.

  • a real film scanner costs like what 80 dollars? youre a fucking monster

  • @traceur1099 I think depending on your intentions of the film, it wont matter much. If you want to do professional work with the film, you will loose resolution and the grain of the film that is so sought after slighty. It depends on your digital camera. I have a 12 megapixel camera, and I will loose some resolution but I'm guessing not enough to do much damage. Plus, since I'm just going to upload to the web, I'll loose resolution anyways so this works for web work.

  • I have an ancient 110 negative (Christmas 1983). I had it over a white back lit background (laptop screen actually with just a totally white image ie blank document) magnified with a lens from some binoculars and then got some pics with my mobile phone camera (no macro tho), got them on to pc and then inverted with MS Paint. That was first time Id seen pics since 1983 and it was a good result!

  • @aimoto does it really effect the quality of the image, really keen to try this out but concerned it will loose the detail that film cameras are so good at having!! plus is the normal procedure to get them developed into normal photographs then take those and scan those? thank you!

  • This is great! I have my degree in photography, and I think this is pretty clever! Well done!

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