Lina's notes

Scanning film negatives with a phone

Lab scans are getting expensive, so I tried digitising a few rolls at home. The setup:

• a cheap A5 LED tracing pad as the light source;
• a piece of black card with a 36×24 mm window cut out, to block stray light;
• a stack of books to hold the phone flat and parallel to the film.

Lock focus and exposure on the frame, shoot in RAW if the phone allows it, and turn off any "scene" processing. Dust is the biggest enemy: a blower brush before every strip saves a lot of retouching later.

Colour negatives need inverting and a lot of white balance fiddling. Black and white is far easier and honestly looks great this way.