Convert negative film

Plenty of time this moment because of Covid-19. So it’s time to open a box with many negative film. All 35mm created with an Olympus Trip 35. My dad used to take photos a long time ago. He bought his Olympus in Katwijk in 1969. For me a surprise to see so many photos but never saw them before.

Because i shot some photos recently with his old Olympus (and my canon eos10 dslr) i wanted to digitalize the negatives by myself. The first few tries were a disaster. Not sharp, bad colors. To improve the quality of the digital photo i made a simple solution. 2 pieces of glass (from 2 photo frames 13x18cm). Created a small frame for 1 35mm frame with black tape. As a backlite i use a led light. The camera, every camera will do fine, i use my Olympus omdem1 with 30mm f3.5 m.zuiko and a remote trigger. To focus i use a piece of paper with printed text. Manual focus on the text. Set the camera on Manual with an Aperture of 7.1 and shutterspeed of 1/15 (depending on the led backlight)

The most difficult part is to convert negative photos to normal. It can be done with lightroom, by changing the curves 0f every color. But you will not get perfect colors. Specially when converting many photos one at a time. It is possible to synchronise all photos but the results are bad. Another possibility is Snapseed on the ipad. It is possible to convert the negative. But in this case the same, it takes a lot of time to tweak the photo for a decent photo.

The best result for now is Negative Lab Pro. A plugin for Lightroom. But amazing what results you get.

Kodacolor shot with Olympus trip35 in 1978 (photocredit Henk Boltje). meermolen de onrust in Muiderberg,convert with Negative Lab Pro