I love film photography but not all my negatives have contact sheet. In fact it doesn’t even worth to pay for an entire contact sheet since some pictures are not that interesting.
So I invented a software where you can preview the color conversion in your negative film and even take pictures using your mobile phone full resolution camera.
This doesn’t substitute a proper scan if you want full quality but it is a quick and dirty way of previewing and you can achieve a significant quality if tweaking with the parameters.
In my experience to have the best results you have to use a uniform white light behind the negative, like a light table. You can improvise with a monitor, ipad or iphone screen behind with white color, but bear in mind if the negative is near the screen you will see the screen pixels.
And turn the lights off, so negative filme won’t reflect your room. You should be able to have nice images now.
Even this way sometimes the phone itself is reflected on the negative, and I’ll try to build a device like the now discontinued Lomography Smartphone Scanner
So we can have a mini “DARKROOM”.
Kodark’s color conversion was greatly improved from version 1.0 to 1.27.
A full version license costs about two beers. It will be nicely invested in beer and code improvements.
KODARK Instructions
1 — Set your iPhone/iPad display to maximum brightness, this makes total difference in exposure / white balance.
2 — Get some uniformly lit light table. You can improvise using a monitor display or another phone / ipad as a light table, but remember if the film is too near you will se the screen pixels interfering.
3 — Exposure parameter changes everything else, tweak it before the others. In actual version contrast will have impact in white balance and tint too. will try to have it more consistent in the future.
4 — press KODARK button to have a still picture anytime. It saves a PNG file with low compression so bear in mind they are going to be big files (7 megabytes on mine).
TIPS to have a better image.
Negatives tends to reflect like a mirror everything in front of them (your ceiling, your phone, yourself) so it will be best to be in a dark room.
Better yet if you can improvise a small dark room with cardboard or dark clothing, exposing only your phone lens.
Good capturing
