From ~2004 up until around 2020 I scanned my film using an Epson 4990 flatbed scanner. At the time I bought it it was one of the best (consumer level) transparency scanners available, used by a lot of photographers like myself. At this level of scanner things don’t change too much, the technology kind of topped out around then and while there are some software tricks that come out from time to time, this is about as good as it gets until you step up into some of the more professional equipment. I still have it and it still works great.
After using it pretty heavily for about the first 6 months or so some shortcomings started to show:
- The included film holders didn’t hold the film flat which caused the resulting scans to look… weird and kind of bad
- There was so much dust on every scan it was kind of amazing and there was seemingly nothing you could do about it
- The whole process was very slow. Not only the image previewing and scanning, but the post-production in Photoshop was pretty labor intensive. Cleaning up all of that dust took a long time.
I eventually came across a company called betterscanning.com which makes aftermarket negative holders for a variety of scanners and film formats, including my Epson 4990. They held a single strip of film in place and flattened it with a piece of anti-newton ring (ANR) glass. Using these holders lets you make really high quality scans of individual negatives. It’s still slow and the dust is still there but it’s tough to beat without going to a professional lab for individual scans. I have their holders for 120 film and 35mm film, both of which seem to be very difficult to get today.
120 (and larger) scanned great, 35mm always came out pretty bad and took as long to scan and clean up as a frame of 120 which is why I think I mostly stopped using 35mm as soon as I got my first medium format camera.
The dust though… I tried a lot of different ways to prevent it, from cleaning the scanner and negatives between each scan, to spraying my whole desk down with a mist of water and cleaning every time. The scanner seemed to attract dust like nothing else. Once I had an image I liked it was easy to spend 20 minutes or more just cleaning up dust and tweaking the exposure in Photoshop. You could spend an entire evening editing a single 12 exposure roll of 120 film. I loved going out shooting for the weekend but I knew what I was doing with my week when I got home with 5 rolls of film to develop and scan and that can be a bit daunting.
There weren’t really any other great options for doing this at home, and there also wasn’t any really clear digital photo editing and cataloging software outside of Photoshop.
I remember using Picasa at the time. I had an early version of Lightroom and tried Aperture for a minute, but mostly I just used Photoshop and organized my scans on the filesystem of my computer like everyone else. File formats, image sizes & resolutions etc were all over the map and there wasn’t any real cataloging to speak of, just filenames and directory structures. It all worked fine but good luck finding things once you had a lot of images or time behind you. If you wanted to have editable files in the future you needed to save your images as high-resolution photoshop (.psd) or TIFF (.tif) files. These took up a lot of space and were really only usable with a limited set of photo editing applications, so you’d have JPEG (.jpg) exports of different versions of the files. It was all kind of a mess.
I used this setup a lot and got pretty comfortable with it, however if you wanted to see the light of day it was never realistic to scan, edit, and store every image on every roll of film. I’d end up spending an evening or 2 on a few rolls of film and never really coming back to revisit them again. As part of that when I came back to all of this film in 2020 and scanned every frame I found a lot of images I’d never really looked at, a few that I really like even.
A few times over the years I took my film to a lab to get processed and I’d have them scan it. At the time it seemed worthwhile to give them $7USD per roll to maybe not have to get out the scanner and spend my evenings fighting dust. Every time I did that I ended up with mediocre jpgs that were great to be able to see the pictures on my computer but I couldn’t make prints and I wouldn’t want to share them anywhere except for maybe an email or text message.
I’d been losing interest in film photography for a few different reasons but the big one was simply how much time and energy it took to process, scan and organize film. As camera scanning started being talked about online in the late 2010s I started paying more attention to it.
Camera scanning might sound weird if you’re not familiar with it but it’s really pretty straight-forward: you take pictures of film negatives or transparencies with a digital camera and process them on the computer. If you’re familiar with photographic copy work (also mostly a lost art at this point) that’s exactly what it is. Instead of taking a picture of a 2 dimensional print, or a piece of physical art, you’re taking a picture of a piece of backlit film.
So after about 15 years of flatbed scanning and a diminishing interest in the medium, I started scanning film with a digital camera.