Digital Capture of B&W Negative Film Using DSLR or Mirrorless Camera

I have 1000s of negatives, digitization using a traditional scanner would be a very long drawn out process unless you have super expensive bulk scanning gear. The result of this method appears to give a good results for my needs, the workflow in my case probably 10 times faster than traditional scanning with the gear I have. The resulting quality is easily good enough for a double page spread in a magazine or at least A3 print. I’m presuming you are confident shooting RAW and have basic Photoshop skills, plenty of stuff online if not. Click on the images below to enlarge if need be  

Sholing Railway station. Summer 1982. Kodak Plus X negative, ‘scanned’ using a DSLR, a tripod mounted Nikon D5200 in this case with a 55mm Micro Nikkor set at F11 (a sweet spot aperture wise and enough depth of field should the negative have a slight bow). I used an iPad with a plain white image as a makeshift light box, and a 35mm film holder from an old scanner.

 

After taking the photo of the film negative and transferring the file to your computer, In Photoshop Adobe RAW, open your camera RAW file as you would normally, crop, straighten etc. Now the clever bit. Select ‘Curves’, then select the ‘Linear’ drop down. What we want to do is turn the negative image in to a positive. Note the diagonal line, that will be the attention of the next image.

Tick the dot in the red circle. Then drag each end the diagonal line up/down to mirror the previous image. Bingo! You have a positive image!

 

Adjust the curve to increase contrast to suit. If you’re familiar with Adobe RAW you’ll discover that the curve controls are back to front. Not an issue. Not shown here, but then use the other controls like lens correction, noise reduction, sharpening and so on as you would normally. Once happy, it’s worth exporting the profile as an XMD file, next time all you’ll have to do is load that. Export resulting image in to Photoshop proper to finish off your edit.