TLDR: You’d need a light box to make this work well.

For the second (and final) part of my ‘digitising 35mm film’ series my plan was to use one of the many mobile phone apps that promise to help you take pictures of your negatives and turn them into something Instagram worthy. Whilst thumbing through the app store though I experienced a strong sense of deja vu.

A quick rummage through my old photographs revealed the culprit – the very first roll of film that I ever attempted to develop at home. At this point I didn’t know if taking pictures with 35mm was going to be anything I’d be taking seriously, so I invested the princely sum of zero pounds on an app that essentially converted negative images to positive ones. This was basically all it did, the interface was terrible, it could only manage one image at a time, and the results look a little like this:

As you can see, there are a number of pretty major issues with this – there are basically about three shades of grey here, the app said to itself ‘well this seems close to white, I’ll make it white, and this seems close to grey, I’ll make it grey’ and then retired to wherever it is that apps hang out when they are not being used. The other major issue is clearly that it’s nearly impossible to get the framing right when wrangling a film strip and a phone in front of a window for some back-lighting, and the app didn’t include anything to crop the image down.

But this was in 2014, and surely even if ‘I don’t want to pay any money’ app technology has not progressed, phone camera technology must have?

So to the app store! I go with the ‘LumoScanner II’ from Lumography. These guys are all about making analogue photography Instagram worthy, so I have high hopes. Even on the landing screen I can see that app technology definitely has improved – I didn’t pay for this app, just like that first attempt many years ago, but this one actually has an interface that looks nice. One of the options is panoramic though, which I am fairly sure isn’t a film format that anyone is using (quick click to confirm, no idea what you’d use it for) so I am beginning to think this isn’t for purists. Maybe it’s a lumography specific format? Anyway, I click on ‘regular’ cos that’s just the sort of guy I am.

Pretty much the same format as my 2014 app – a nice square to put my negative into and a big red button to take the image – however now I have a few options! I can tell the app what sort of film I am using, and there are a whole bunch of other things to mess with, including exposure and contrast – Helpful! There is also a little icon with a mountain on it, but clicking it doesn’t seem to do anything, though I feel like I may just not be cool and ‘lumo’ enough to understand it. So the app looks better, how are the images…

All of the issues that I had back in 2014 remain, getting the negative centred, and in front of a good light source is nearly impossible, and whilst the app looks better, the images absolutely do not. My old app gave an image that is almost the same size, but with a much higher resolution – the detail, dynamic range and sharpness are light-years ahead in my first photo, pretty ironic considering it was taken five years ago.

This isn’t to trash the Lomography app, there is a place for this, and if you have the time to set up the negatives, and a really high quality phone camera, you can get probably usable images from this, or at least ones that you could Instagram filter into something usable – but for me, looking for quality, this just didn’t work!

The moral of the story? You are probably going to struggle to get really good images from 35mm black and white negatives with anything but a dedicated film scanner, and this isn’t necessarily because this is where you are going to get the best resolution or DPI, but because this is the only place that you’ll be able to completely control the amount of light hitting the negative, get it completely flat, and do everything quickly for more than one negative. So thinking about buying a 35mm camera? Factor in the cost of an 11-year-old film scanner at the same time – mine cost me 40 quid!