How To Digitize Your Film Negatives Using Your Smartphone Camera
Filmcameras may have revolutionized the photography landscape, but it’s probably been a few years since you last came across one. Given the unmatched convenience digital cameras offer, many photography enthusiasts simply prefer to use digital gear instead of their analog counterparts. However, while film cameras have become a thing of the past, you might still own a lot of film negatives. They contain too many precious memories to be thrown out, but at the same time, it’s hard to fully enjoy them since they’re in negative form and stashed away in dark drawers.
Thankfully, there are many ways to digitize film negatives and keep them on your phone or displayed in smart picture frames. Professional digitizing companies provide high-quality results but at an equally high cost, with some priced at over $500 for 500 photos. You can also buy a high-quality scanner, but they can cost as much as $500 too. If you’re after a more affordable method and are fine with lower-quality photos, you can also try digitizing your film negatives using your smartphone. We’ll walk you through the process step-by-step.
Set up a DIY mobile film scanner
Before you take photos of your film negatives with your smartphone, you should first assemble a DIY mobile film scanner. Here’s how to get that done:
Once you have this all set up, you’re ready to digitize your negatives using three options.
Option 1: Scan your film with FilmBox
FilmBox is a highly rated negative film scanner app available for iOS and Android. This app makes digitizing your negatives easier as it automatically scans them for you and outputs images requiring little to no editing. Follow these steps to use FilmBox on your smartphone:
It’s important to note that FilmBox isn’t entirely free of charge. Only your first few scans are free, so this might not be the best option if you have dozens of film rolls to digitize.
Option 2: Edit your negative in Image Toolbox
Image Toolbox is aphoto editor app for Android, but what makes it stand out is that it’s open-source (so it’s completely free of charge) and it works completely offline with no accounts required. While it isn’t a dedicated film scanner app, you’re able to still use it for digitizing your film negative. Here’s how:
If the output after applying the filter is still too far from the colors you expect on the photo, you can add more filters to edit it further. Image Toolbox lets you add white balance, brightness, and sharpen effects to the image, along with color filters like Saturation, Color Matrix 3x3, and Color Balance. When you achieve your desired colors, press Save to save your edited photo.
Option 3: Use Adobe Lightroom to process your film
Adobe Lightroom is one of thebest photo editing apps on iPhoneand Android and comes complete with a tone curve feature that allows you to manually adjust the colors of the photo as you see fit. This gives you more control over how the image will look. you may access this feature for free, so there’s no need to avail yourself of any of Lightroom’s in-app purchases. Here’s how to use Lightroom for digitizing your film:
You should now see your image in your photos app.
Option 4: Do the film inversion on GIMP
If you find processing the photos of your film negatives in Lightroom too tedious and technical, you might be better off with a desktop alternative. GIMP is an excellent option for this, not only because it’s completelyfree to install and useon Windows, Mac, and Linux, but also because transforming raw photos of negatives in GIMP is pretty much a walk in the park, unlike Lightroom. Here’s what you need to do to post-process your images on GIMP:
Feel free to play around with the other options available in the Colors menu to get your photo closer to the real colors. Once you’re happy with the image, save it to your computer. Press File > Export As and hit Export.
Option 5: Capture the negatives with an Instagram story filter
One thing you probably didn’t know you could do on Instagram is scan film negatives. Yes, the app comes with a nifty story filter that digitizes the negatives for you. So if you’re looking for an easy and unlimited way to scan your film without having to deal with complicated photo manipulation, then Instagram might just be what you need. Here’s how to use it to digitize your negative:
Although Cs41 Color Negative does a decent job of scanning your film negatives, the photos may not have colors as true to their original ones. If you’re not satisfied with the results, you’re able to just use the filter to view your negatives and pick your favorites before you scan them using a limited-scan app such as FilmBox.
