Digitizing Film Photos

I can honestly say, I wish I had figured this out a year ago. I have wanted to use my DSLR to digitize film negatives instead of my scanner. The scanner has some resolution issues at times, is slow, and has a limited useful range (in terms of negative exposure range.)

After numerous different tries and configurations, I finally managed to find a way to digitize 35mm (and smaller) negatives with a crop-sensor DSLR. This video shows you how to do it:

Here's a clickable link.



I've found the results are very good and significantly faster than scanning. To simply digitize slides without any processing takes a tiny fraction of the time. For black and white negatives (which require inversion), it takes about the same amount of time as slides, though, because the negatives come in strips and can be fed through the setup more easily.

Color negatives are still vexing. The red film base gives the DSLR some problems in terms of scanning the color accurately. What I need is an unexposed frame and to then correct the white balance to make that frame clear. Then I can scan color negatives correctly, I think.

See you again in a week!