Scanning Color Negatives With Dslr

While the software for this scanner is incredibly powerful it falls apart when it comes to inverting color negatives.

Scanning color negatives with dslr. What i ve learnt during the last two or three of years of scanning film with my dslr. I ve seen many articles on the web explaining the basics of digitising film negative or transparencies with a digital camera. You take a photo of a negative into a light source and invert. But that alone led me to scan negatives that looked like the one on the left above.

Can i scan these films with just my dslr and the stuff i had lying around. Is getting advanced color grading. It s been just about three years now that i ve been using a drum scanner which has drastically changed my scanning process with color negative film. I ve never done it before neither with a proper scanner nor by improvising.

By scanning our film with our dslr then processing raw with negative lab pro we ve been able to get noticeably improved skin tones truer color reproduction and full creative control which is great news because i paid 130 to have just 5 rolls of 120 film developed and scanned by that lab which i will never need to do again. Color correction has been a nightmare with c 41. The basics are quite simple. If you ve taken pictures with your dslr you don t have to worry about remembering because you ll always have the original file as a negative.

I use mine along side a nikon coolscan 9000ed a 2000 top of the range negative scanner. Scanners are tuned to deal with this mask already so the effect of it is pretty moot when using a film or flatbed scanner. When photographing the negative however it became my main concern. This one is for you dslr scanning folks or those who want more control out of your film scanner.

How to scan film negatives with a dslr. Moving onto a color negative i knew the process was going to be a bit trickier to deal with the orange mask of the film. If you re scanning on a flatbed just be sure to scan it as if it s a positive because negative lab pro does its thing by converting the negative into a positive.