Quick take: Lab scans add up fast, so I started scanning (technically, digitizing) my film negatives at home with my digital camera and the compact JJC film digitizer. With a Fujifilm X-T5 and an old Canon FD 100mm macro, a full roll takes about three minutes and saves me around $9. Then I convert the negatives in FilmLab. Scanning your own film also gives you control over color, and some shots I thought were ruined turned out great.
Why I Started Scanning My Own Film
A few months ago, I took up film photography to create some healthy separation between the work I do for money and my own enjoyment of photography. Shooting ads day and night was wearing me thin, to the point where my cameras mostly stayed home. While listing old gear to sell, I found my film cameras, went out to shoot a roll, and ended up shooting a lot of rolls.
That's when the costs hit. Locally, it costs me about $6 to develop a roll, and with scans it's around $15 to $16 with tax. That's what pushed me to pick up a digitizer.
And yes, the correct term is digitizing. But nobody Googles "how to digitize film negatives," so I'm calling it scanning.
Why the JJC Digitizer?
I've scanned negatives with a camera before using the standard setup: a copy stand, a light source and a film holder. If you have space to leave that set up, it's great. But even broken down, it takes up a lot of room, and in a small apartment every square foot counts. I hadn't scanned a single roll in over a year since moving, because I had nowhere to lay it all out.
The JJC unit is much smaller, and besides saving on lab scans, there's another big reason to scan your own film. Someone at the lab is choosing the color profiles and adjustments for your scans. Some of my old lab scans looked bad, and photos I thought were dead in the water or poorly exposed turned out great when I scanned them myself. I'm going to dig up a lot of my old negatives and rescan them.
Cutting Your Film
The cheapest option is asking the lab not to cut your film, which saves about $2 a roll. I cut mine with scissors, which usually works, but I cut a couple of frames short. So I picked up JJC's film cutter. It has the same kind of backlight as the digitizer plus a sharp blade, so you can see exactly where each frame ends and make precise cuts. I don't recommend holding film up to your laptop screen and snipping, especially for an important roll.
How to Use the Digitizer
The digitizer comes with two film holders: one for 120 film and one for 35mm, which is what most people shoot. I shoot 35mm on point-and-shoots like the Fujifilm Tiara and on Canon AE-1s and an F-1.
For scanning, I use my Fujifilm X-T5 with an adapted Canon FD 100mm macro lens. I've adapted FD lenses to my Fuji cameras for about eight years. They were dirt cheap back then. I bought the 100mm macro new in the box for about $80, and it's also the lens I use for my food and product videos.
Mount the camera on the digitizer using the included Arca-Swiss plate.
Put it on a tripod or something stable. I use a little contraption made from a Platypod and a ball head. It keeps everything balanced.
Load your film into the holder. The 35mm holder fits about six frames.
Power the light panel over USB and switch it on.
Stop down to about F8 to F11 for the sharpest image of the film strip.
Overexpose by about 1 to 1.5 stops. On the X-T5, that gave me the best results straight out of camera. On a full-frame camera, about one stop is probably enough. Shoot RAW so you have flexibility.
After cutting, it took me about three minutes to scan a roll, saving about $9. That works out to roughly $180 an hour, and enough savings over 20 rolls to buy another 20 rolls of film.
How to Convert Your Negatives
There are a few ways to convert your negatives once they're scanned:
Manually. I've done it, and it's okay.
Negative Lab Pro. It's very popular and great, but it's a Lightroom Classic plugin, and I can't stand Lightroom Classic. I still might get it for the control it gives you without exporting to another program. It has a free trial.
Cinestill presets. They work well, look great, run in Lightroom mobile on your phone, and they're free. I recommend most people try these first.
FilmLab. This is what I settled on. It's standalone software, so I'm not dealing with more Adobe, and everything looks really good. It also has a free trial, though a shorter one.
FilmLab Conversion Basics
In FilmLab, you choose color negative or color positive, then pick your film stock and the camera you scanned with, which seems to apply corrections based on that camera's color science. You can also choose your light source, though I didn't see a big difference there.
Scanning flare correction was really useful. The JJC backlight is adjustable, and I probably set it a bit too bright, causing flare toward the edges. FilmLab removed it very well. From there you have tint, density, highlight and shadow controls.
I was surprised by how much information color negatives hold. Unlike digital, you can blow out highlights on color negative film and recover a lot. I pulled all the cloud detail back from a blown-out sky. You could even export two exposures and merge them in Photoshop for a perfectly exposed sky and scene. Purists may not like it, but that's what modern processing looks like.
Final Words
If you scan about 10 rolls a year, the JJC digitizer pays for itself, and I don't think it's breaking anytime soon. Eventually, I'd like to develop my film at home too, so let me know in the comments if you want to see that process.
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