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Any film photographer (and that includes those of us old enough to have shot with film before using digital) should be interested in ways to digitize negative and slides.
If you already have a scanner, that’s great. You’ll get reasonable results from most of them. But there’s a cost in terms of efficiency as the scanning process is slow. Scanning also creates TIFF files that take up lots of hard drive space.
Neither of these matter much if you’re only going to scan a few negatives or slides. But they matter more if you have a lot of film.
It’s much easier to use a macro lens and a lightbox, especially if you don’t have a scanner. Your wallet will thank you as it’s much cheaper to buy a lightbox than it is to buy a good scanner. As a bonus you can use lightboxes for other types of photography, such as photographing pressed flowers.
And of course you can use a macro lens for many things other than digitizing negatives and slides.
Why do photographers digitize negatives and slides?
In the digital age we’ve got used to working at high speed. You can take a photo with your camera and view it instantly. You can import it into Lightroom Classic in a few seconds and start work in the Develop module right away. Digital photography has bought us speed and convenience.
Viewing slides and negatives is much more difficult. Back in the day photographers used lightboxes and loupes to evaluate their slides and negatives. Anyone who remembers squinting through a loupe to see which negatives were worth developing, or which slides were keepers, will appreciate how much easier things are now.
Digitizing slides and negatives means that you can see your older photos on your computer screen. You can organize them into Collections in Lightroom Classic. You can even print your favorites and create new artwork for your home.
If you have a good photo backup strategy (and you should!) those digitized photos get archived along with the rest of your photos. This is important because slides and negatives fade. They’re also vulnerable to mould or fungus if stored in damp conditions. As for surviving a fire or flood – forget it.
Personally I love looking at photos taken a long time ago. I made all the photos illustrating this tutorial in France, Spain or the UK around 25 years ago. As well as being slightly shocked by how quickly time slides by, it’s given me an interesting glimpse into the past.
How to digitize negatives and slides with a lightbox and macro lens
Using a digital camera rather than a scanner has two advantages.
- It’s quicker.
- You can use the Raw format. You save hard drive space and get full control over developing settings, including assigning profiles and adjusting White Balance.
What if I don’t have a macro lens?
If you don’t have a macro lens the easiest solution is to use a 50mm prime lens (if you have one) with an extension tube. It’s easier if you’re digitizing medium format film as you need less magnification.
Another option is to buy an inexpensive legacy manual focus macro lens from eBay and a lens mount adaptor for your camera.
How to digitize negatives and slides step by step
1. Set your camera on a tripod facing downwards. You need to make sure the camera is as level as you’ll get the best results when the digital sensor is parallel with the lightbox. You can do this by eye, or better still, using a hotshoe spirit level.
Note: A purpose built copy stand is even easier to use. Small copy stands are relatively inexpensive to buy.
2. Place your lightbox underneath your camera, turn it on and set the brightness to its highest setting. Place your slide or negative on top of the lightbox and focus on it.
Now you have to work out how to get your camera close enough to the lightbox to fill the frame with the negative or slide. It’s easy with a copy stand, more complicated if you’re using a tripod. You may have to splay the tripod legs out wide to do it.
3. The next step is to use some black card or foamboard and cut a hole in it. The card blocks out the light surrounding the slide or negative, which creates flare and makes it harder to get a good quality result.
4. If you’re digitizing a slide place it over the hole in the cardboard. If it’s a negative or unmounted slide place it underneath so the cardboard keeps it flat. Set the camera’s aperture to f8 or f11 for a combination of good image quality and depth of field. Set the ISO to the lowest setting your camera offers, and a shutter speed that gives a good exposure. Focus the lens (manually is best) and take the photo with either a cable release or the two second self-timer.
Now you can swap our your slides or negatives one by one. It’s a quick and easy process once you’ve set it up.
Things to note
- I did this during the day, so that I could photograph the set up, but you’ll get better quality if you do it at night and turn the lights off once you start to prevent extraneous light hitting the front of the slide and reducing the image quality. Another option is to make a cardboard tube that fits around the lens hood and rests on the black card.
- This process works best with bright slides and thinner negatives. I couldn’t get a usable result from my darker slides.
- You may notice faults in your technique that you didn’t know existed. For example, for many years I used manual focus lenses and it’s obvious that I didn’t get sharp focus as often as I thought.
- Slides are prone to odd color casts, so be prepared to do a little work in Lightroom Classic or Photoshop to correct them.
- This method is easy if you have mounted slides but for unmounted film you’ll appreciate some assistance when it comes to keeping it flat.
The best tool I’ve seen for this are Lomography’s Digitalizer holders (available for 35mm and medium format film).
How to develop negatives in Lightroom Classic
Slides are relatively easy to develop in Lightroom Classic, but what if you’re digitizing negatives? You have a couple of options. The first is to export your scanned photos to Photoshop where you can use the Invert function (Image > Adjustments > Invert) to turn your negative image into a positive one.
The second option is to buy the Negative Lab Pro plugin. It costs $99 but works well and gives you a lot of custom options. Best of all it lets you stay in Lightroom Classic and work with your Raw files, potentially saving lots of hard drive space if you’re planning to digitize large numbers of negatives. A trial version of the plugin’s available if you want to test it.
Conclusion
As you can see from the photos in this tutorial the results from using a macro lens and a lightbox to digitize negatives and slides are good. You’ll get better results from a high end scanner, but it’s going to cost more money and take more time. If you’re looking for a quick and relatively inexpensive way to digitize negatives and slides, then this is it.
Further reading
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Comments
Nice article. Thank you
Nikon makes a dedicated digitizing adapter (ES-2) to be used with a 60mm macro lens. I have recently done a few tests with slides I digitized some time ago with a Minolta Dimage Elite 5400 Scanner and in general the results are almost indistinguishable from the scanned ones. However, there is no ICE (spot and scratch removal) function when photographing the slides, but it offers the possibility of some kind of HDR to improve dynamic range.
I am building an adapter to use my new 105mm, which is a much better glass than the 60mm, with the ES-2 adapter
Of course I am using the direct photography method with the lightbox and black mask for my 6×6 slides.
Thanks Andrew, helpful tips as usual. I wavered between a slide/negative copier and a macro lens, but the choice of a macro was easy, as a lens is much more fun than a copier that can only be used for one thing. Good tip about the card covering the light box, I’ll give that a try.
I’ve used Lightroom 5 to reverse my negatives, but results are varied and lots of time spent getting decent results, a couple of basic presets have helped. Unfortunately, I don’t think Negative Prolab is compatible with my version of Lightroom, are you aware of any other plug-ins or standalone packages that would quicken the process?… thanks for the articles, always informative.
Hi Barry, sorry I don’t know of any plugins that will help. If you don’t have Photoshop then perhaps Photoshop Elements?
Hi Andrew…I found your article on scanning slides and negatives very timely as I have been looking for a better alternative than my flatbed scanner that I thought would make the process easier.
Can you recommend a lightbox? Some of the ones I have come across have mentioned that they aren’t the best if being used to scan slides or film.
Thanks
Hi Steve, if it helps this is the one I bought:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06XQ7WZKW/
Great article. I just organized all of my slides and negatives (literally thousands and thousands of them) into Archival Storage Sheets, clear quality polyethylene – NO PVC – safe for long term storage. Each 8.5″ x 11″ sheet holds individual slides or negative strips. I then placed each sheet on my Light Table, blocked out the light around the sheets with solid tag board and took a picture of it like you just described for individual frames. I made a digital contact sheet for each sheet. I used a lens set to approximately 50 mm (normal). I now have large 3-ring binders holding all of my storage sheets that have been cataloged with a separate sheet number. These sheet numbers are the file names for my digital contact sheets. Now I can review the digital contact sheets to sort what I have. Then I can either take the time to make an exposure either with the camera like you just described or a scan of individual frames. This saves a ton of time as opposed to digitizing all of the individual frames first.
That’s a great idea, thanks for sharing.
Nice simple article with techniques most photographers can easily use.
One major thing I’ve tripped over with copying both slides and prints is DUST, dirty great globs of it. Sadly invisible to the naked eye unless you actually look for it!
So my thoughts are to assume its there:
1. Use a blower (Jobo Rocket?) to blast off loose stuff – somewhere it won’t resettle on other slides, negatives etc
2. Use a clean soft brush (lens brush) followed by another puff of air
3. If absolutely necessary wipe the slide/negative with a clean soft lens cloth – be careful that slide or negative is the original
If that sounds like a lot of work, trust me I’ve learnt through bitter experience, its much quicker than editing dust & debris out or re shooting.
PS loved Brian Tennant’s contact sheet idea
Excellent article!
I have a question you might answer for me: Are the photographed slides through a lightbox excellent quality for printing? Resolution?
Back story: My father recently passed and I was willed all of my fathers pictures. He took pictures for over 80 years and I no longer measure the amount of slides in boxes of 36, I now measure in pounds of slides. I have 15 boxes of slides that weigh over 30 lbs!
So, I looked for alternatives to a scanner that would take twenty minutes per scan. Decades! Even two minutes per scan would take years. The idea of photographing through a quality 95 cpi lightbox appears to be faster and if I sort out all the repetitive slides… well you get the point. I believe this will be a monumental task.
Any advice from you or your other readers will be greatly appreciated. Dad was a geologist who traveled the world and has pictures and pictures and pictures
Part of me is excited, part sad, and part apprehensive as how to begin. I wish money were no object but my budget is low. I have a Sony A7 and a 55mm prime lens. I also have a Canon 70D with a 50mm prime lens.
Lastly, is there a market for these images?
Thanks so very very much!
Hi Marvin, thanks for sharing your story. One of the benefits from using a camera to make photos of slides is that the quality is more than good enough for printing in terms of resolution (the photos will have the same resolution as any others made with your A7). A lot depends on the slides – some might be too dark to photograph well.
For best quality I recommend that you buy a macro lens for your camera. Second-hand is fine if money is tight (try mpb.com).
I can’t say if there’s a market for the photos. It depends on what they’re of and how good they are. If it turns out your father had a good eye for a photo and that he has an archive of historical interest, then there might be a market. It sounds like the collection has lots of potential – it might help at some stage (once you have some photos to work with) to get the opinion of somebody else, perhaps somebody who works in a museum, to see if there’s any historical interest.
A final thought. Have you considered buying a loupe (something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Carson-LumiLoupe-Stand-Magnifier-Loupe/dp/B000CAHCQS/ ) and a lightbox so you can look through the slides before scanning? Before digital photography came along loupes were the standard way of viewing slides (a slide projector is another option). With so many photos to go through you want to start by finding the gems and digitizing those. There’s no point in digitizing every photo in a set of 36, for example, then finding that just one or two are interesting enough to keep (I should probably add that idea to the article!).
Hope that helps,
Andrew
Hi Marvin, another thought I just had is that Nikon sells a slide copying adapter. You need to pair it with a compatible Nikon macro lens and you’d need to buy either a Nikon camera (again second-hand is fine) or Nikon to Sony adapter to use it. You might also need to use a flash rather than daylight to get the best results.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nikon-ES-1-Slide-Copying-Adapter/dp/B00009R8VM/
I haven’t used the Nikon device, but I used a similar one for Canon cameras a long time ago and it worked well. You can search on Google for reviews of the Nikon adapter. If your budget permits this could be a faster option than using a lightbox.
There are third party options too, which are less expensive, like this one (although the reviews aren’t great):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflecta-Slide-Duplicator-Digital-Camera/dp/B00A21ASYA/
Good luck!
Andrew
I’m sort of in the same place as Marvin, except I’m photographing slides for a friend.
I purchased this light (PHOTOOLEX RL135 10W RGB Video Light) from Amazon Au, for $AU84 and put it in a small cheap wooden box with an appropriately sized hole cut out of the top. Glued popsicle sticks as guides for the slides.
Camera is just an Olympus E-mark10II, with cheapish macro lens
Works ok on the first 300 slides with one problem I’ll mention at the end of this.
I spend a fair bit of time cleaning/fixing the images using basically:
Photoshop – Topaz denoise – Topaz sharpen – photoshop neural filter ‘colorize”
That’s really worked well, albeit at about 5 mins/photo, but every image is getting individual attention. I have thought of batch processing using Luminar and then choosing some of the results for further processing.
Problem I alluded to is that some light seems to diffract(?) around the L & R edges of the slides so I’m losing a tiny edge…not always but frequently. Am currently messing about trying to sort that out.
Any more info or swap ideas, I can be reached at slides@steg.33mail.com
Tony
You mentioned a macro lens, but is there a benefit over shorter or longer macro lens?
Hi Jason, not for digitizing slides and negatives, no. Focal length isn’t important.
Great article. But when I tried scanning with my lightbox, I’m getting multicolored banding. How can I get rid of this? Thanks
This could happen if your slides are mounted in a glass or plastic mount. If not, then it’s likely to be something to do with the type of light source in your lightbox, or the plastic surface. If your slides (or negatives) aren’t in a glass or plastic mount, then the next step is to try a different lightbox.
Such an interesting and timely article, thank you Andrew.
We have over 7000 transparencies recording our travels over the last 45 years and I have been wanting but dreading this massive job! Now I am retired it’s time I got on with it.
I did wonder about using our projector and screen. With my camera on a tripod + cable release to photographing each image during a viewing session – would be relatively quick as my slide cartridges carry 100 at a time.
I do have an old flatbed scanner – it came with various black plastic holders including one for 12 transparencies – might this work just as well as the foamboard/black card?
Hi Sue, yes it sounds like the plastic holders will work. I don’t think you’ll get a good quality image from photographing a projection on a screen, the lightbox method will work much better for you.
Apologies if this is a little too camera-specific, but is there a Fujinon macro lens you’d recommend? Or an extension tube you can recommend that would work with a Fuji lens ?
I’ve got most of the rest of the set up … lightbox, Fujifilm XT5 (with many lenses but no macro), copy stand … everything but a macro lens.
Thanks so much in advance.
Hi Joan, I use the Samyang f2.8 100mm macro lens. Fuji makes two extension tubes you can try out which could be a less expensive option. A macro lens gets you close enough to fill the frame with the image you’re copying, another lens with an extension tube might not get you that close. But if you’re happy to crop then that won’t be a problem.
Helpful article, thanks. Since my compact digicam has excellent macro focusing capability, can’t I just use that? Granted it doesn’t shoot RAW but I am able to make some manual adjustments.
Hi John, try it and see. That’s the only way you’ll know. It’s a nice use of old equipment if it works.