How I Edit My 35mm Film Scans

So recently, I’ve been getting questions surrounding my film scans and what my process looks like when it comes to editing them, so in this blog, I want to dive a bit into that and go through some of the things I do when it comes to achieving my desired look.

Before we jump into it, there’s a few things we need to talk about:

1: Editing your scans is totally normal

Yes, it is perfectly okay and normal to edit your film scans. Even before Lightroom, many photographers that developed in the darkroom edited their film to a certain degree using various methods, and I’d say that 95% of photographers these days do some type of post-processing to their scans. Don’t listen to analog purists who say you should never edit your scans – they’re just pushing a weird agenda on you. Personally, I edit my film scans in Lightroom and that’s the software I’m going to be referring to here, but you can use any other software you prefer.

2: You need proper exposure

Your film scans will only look as good as how you shoot the actual photo itself. What I mean by that is that you need to expose your images correctly. With film, it’s always best to lean on the end of overexposure. Personally, when I’m shooting a 400 ISO film, I’m typically overexposing by about 0.7-1 stop, which means I’m metering my scenes at 200-250 ISO. You can go as far as overexposing 2-3 stops when you’re shooting color negative and B&W film, but if you’re shooting slide film, you need to be a lot more accurate with your exposure because it is much less forgiving.

If you underexpose film, and you’re only getting JPG files back from your lab, it leaves you very little room to play around with. Therefore, if you’re unsure of how to meter a scene, I’d recommend you overexpose it just to be safe.

3: Developing & Scanning

Most people will send their film off to a lab to be developed and scanned, and others will develop/scan themselves – it’s all personal preference. I’ve never developed/scanned myself because there is quite a bit of an upfront cost (not to mention, the time that goes into it). If you’re not going to be scanning yourself, my best advice is to send your film to a lab you trust – which could take some trial/error but it’s worth it in the long run if you plan to continue shooting film. For me, I’m lucky enough to be an ambassador for Gelatin Labs here in New Jersey, however even if I wasn’t, I’d be sending my film to them regardless.

A lot of labs these days have different options when it comes to how you want to receive your scanned files. Gelatin is pretty special when it comes to this because they have so many options in what they call “Gelforms” - which are different scanning formulas balancing different temperatures and contrast. Personally, I use the “Flat Earth” Gelform for most of my rolls because it gives me the most flexibility when editing my scans, and I also get my scans as TIFF files as they are larger files than standard JPGs.

4: Choosing a film stock

Choosing what film to shoot can be both exciting and tedious. I’m 2 years into shooting film, and to this day I’m still shooting new stocks and playing around to see which stocks fit my style and workflow. Some of my favorites for both look/cost are Kodak Gold 200, Fuji 400, and Cinestill 800T, but I love to change it up depending on what I’m shooting. With that said, your choice of film will dictate what your scans look like. Different stocks/types of film have different dynamic ranges – for example, slide film such as Ektachrome 100 has less dynamic range than a color negative film such as Portra 400, which is said to have some of the best dynamic range when it comes to color negative film today. Therefore, if you mess up your exposure slightly on a stock that has higher dynamic range like Portra 400, there’s a good chance you’ll still have a lot of latitude when it comes to getting your scans to look how you want them to.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about editing.

EDITING WORKFLOW: BASIC ADJUSTMENTS + TONE CURVES

NOTE: For those of you wondering, my MSF Lightroom presets are not designed for film scans — only digital RAW photos.

Now, I don’t have any “secret” tips or techniques when it comes to editing my scans. Most of my editing lives in the basic adjustments and tones curves sections of Lightroom.

The first thing I’ll do once I import my scans into Lightroom is crop/straighten the photos, and usually, they need it. With my Leitz-Minolta CL, I’m using a 35mm lens on a camera whose widest framelines are 40mm, so I am doing a bit of guessing when it comes to composition so therefore I typically have to straighten most photos.

TONE CURVES

Before I go to the basic corrections sections, I jump down to the tone curve and I always start by dragging the bottom of the tone curve over to the right to some capacity, depending on the image. From there, I’ll adjust the rest of the tone curve accordingly (see screenshots below for examples). The only other curve I’ll usually play around with will be the blue channel, and depending on the stock I’m shooting, I’ll pull the midtones slightly into the cooler or warmer region.

BASIC ADJUSTMENTS

Once I get a good base from the curves, I’ll look at my histogram and then go into my basic corrections to make further adjustments. Because I’m getting very flat scans from the lab, I typically have to push my sliders a bit more than someone who is getting standard JPGs, but I’m more than happy to spend a bit more time editing if it means I have more control.

After briefly looking at some scans and the adjustments I made on them, there’s a very big pattern I noticed: the only sliders that are in the positive range are contrast, whites, and dehaze (and occasionally highlights), with nearly everything else in the negative range, which is due to the fact that I shoot overexposed, but I still like a lot of contrast in my images.

Here’s a look into the adjustments I make:

Contrast: Most of my scans will look pretty good after simply adjusting the contrast, so before I even touch the exposure, I’ll try to dial in the contrast, and I typically find myself being between +10 and +20 on that slider.
Highlights: I typically bring highlights down, but that really just depends on the stock that I’m shooting. For most of my Japan work on Cinestill 800T, I was bringing down the highlights between -10 and -50.
Shadows: For my shadows, 99% of my scans have the slider in the negative range. We are taught to overexpose film because it is much harder to retain shadow detail, so because shadows can occasionally look a bit muddy (even if you overexpose), I bring them down which helps me also get more contrast.
Whites: This is a slider that will typically be on the positive side. I find that boosting the whites allows you to brighten up the image without doing so with the exposure slider, which brightens up the entirety of the image. I usually have this slider between +10 and +40.
Blacks: I’d say I have the black slider in the negative about 99% of the time, with the other 1% leaving that slider untouched. This gives my images a bit more pop.
Dehaze: This slider never drops into the negative, which means I’m adding it to almost every image.
Vibrance: Lastly, I usually bring the vibrance slider up between +20 and +50 to bring out the colors a bit more.

I don’t touch the texture, clarity, or saturation sliders.

You can continue to go more in-depth with the color mixer and color grading sections, but I personally find my images to be basically done after the basic corrections and tone curves. Here and there, I might boost the saturation of a specific color in the image.

After I dial in the settings on one image in the roll, and there are other shots that were taken in the same lighting conditions, I’ll sync the edits that I made on the first photo across to the other ones and will make tweaks on the others if needed.

CONCLUSION

Film is a bit unpredictable because there are so many different factors that play into how your scans are going to look. Depending on what stock/lens you use, how you expose, what scanner your lab uses and how they adjust your scans, you can get different results if you tweak any of those things. At the end of the day, you have to shoot a lot, experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them in order to find out what works for you, and once you dial in your workflow, it gets a whole lot more fun.