When I developed my first roll of film at a drugstore, I received both printed photos and a CD with digital scans of my images. While the prints turned out beautifully, the scans’ quality was awful—low resolution, and the colors were off. They charged me extra for those ugly scans.
Shortly after buying my first non-disposable film camera, I ordered a dedicated film scanner—the Epson V600. Luckily, I received a faulty unit and was able to return it within a week, as I didn’t like it at all. Being a flatbed scanner, its optical resolution isn’t high enough for 35mm film. While it might work well with 120 film, the 35mm images came out soft and lacked details. Additionally, the scanner is huge, taking up about a quarter of my desk.
After returning it, I ordered a 35mm scanner instead—the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE. This scanner captures significantly more detail from 35mm film, producing sharp final images without needing extra sharpening in post. It’s compact and comes with a carrying case, so I usually store it in my drawer and only set it up when I need to scan a roll or two.
While I’m pleased with the image quality from this scanner, it has two major drawbacks: it’s entirely manual, meaning you have to move the film rails for each frame, and it’s painfully slow, especially if you rely solely on the included SilverFast scanning software. The good news is that with some additional investment, you can optimize the workflow and save valuable time for more important things in life.
Hardware 🔗
Scanning a single frame at 3600 ppi with the OpticFilm 8200i takes about 30 seconds. While we can’t speed up the scanning process, we can use this time more efficiently!
The scanner comes with a film strip holder and a holder for diafilm slides. The great thing is that these holders are sold separately as well. I ordered the second film strip holder for €15 here. Now, while the scanner is busy scanning a frame, I can prepare the next film strip, place it in the holder, and blow off any dust. This way, when I finish scanning 6 frames, I can immediately start on the next 6 without wasting time on preparation in between.
The scanner has ISRD functionality, which automatically detects scratches on the film using a laser scan. While this might sound impressive, it adds an extra 30 seconds to the scanning process. Unless you’re digitizing old film archives of your grandpa, likely the negatives won’t have enough scratches to justify using ISRD. It’s often better to fix minor imperfections in post-processing, as manual correction tends to look much better than the automatic one anyway. So yes, disable ISRD when scanning color film (it doesn’t work for black and white film).
Software and workflow 🔗
SilverFast, bundled with the scanner, is actually powerful software, but its UX could be better. When I first started using it, it took me about two hours to scan a single roll of film. I used it for both scanning and negative conversion. The problem with this approach was that most of my converted scans had a magenta tint, and I had to manually adjust the colors, which was time-consuming. Then I learned about selecting a neutral white point to set the white balance, which slightly improved my scanning speed. Overall, my inefficient workflow for color film looked like this:
- Pre-scan the photo (about 10 seconds per frame)
- Adjust the frame to set proper borders
- Set the white balance
- Adjust exposure setting if needed
- Tweak the colors if needed
- Scan the photo
- Move the film strip to the next frame
For black and white film, the process was a bit faster since there’s no need to set the white balance or tweak the colors. After that, I used Lightroom to fix some imperfections or crop photos when necessary.
Here’s the catch: if we perform the negative conversion afterwards and use SilverFast only for scanning negatives, we can streamline the process to just two steps—scanning the photo and moving the film strip. This approach requires additional software for negative conversion. There are several options, but the two most popular are Negative Lab Pro and Grain2Pixel. The first costs $100 and requires Lightroom, while the second is free but requires Photoshop. Whichever you choose, you’ll need an Adobe subscription. I initially used the free Grain2Pixel, which works well for black and white negatives, but in my opinion, for converting color negatives, it’s worth paying for Negative Lab Pro. Sure, $100 and an Adobe subscription aren’t cheap, but neither is your valuable time.
For this setup to work, first change the SilverFast scanning option to ‘Positive’ and set it to 16 bit HDR raw for bw film or 48 bit HDR raw for color film. This configuration avoids conversion and saves the raw negative image with all its information. It will also disable all editing buttons and sidebars. Next, stretch the frame to its maximum. This will scan images with borders, but don’t worry—we’ll crop them later. The goal here is to skip the 10 seconds needed for pre-scanning each photo. Set the file type to DNG (Digital Negative). Once that’s done, you can start scanning your film. With two film strip holders, you can scan a roll with 36 photos in approximately 18 minutes (36 frames x 30 seconds per frame / 60 seconds).
After scanning the roll, I import the negative images directly into Lightroom and use the Negative Lab Pro plugin for conversion. This plugin supports roll analysis, allowing you to select all the negative images from the same roll and analyze them together to convert them to positive. At this stage, it’s important to set the border buffer since we scanned the photos with borders. Without this, the borders might affect the automatic exposure during analysis. While the plugin creator recommends using the border as a neutral white point for white balance, it generally works well even without this step. Occasionally, I manually adjust the white balance if I’m not satisfied with the automatic results.
The plugin also offers a range of useful color profiles that can streamline the process. After converting the images, I crop the borders in Lightroom for all of them at once, remove any remaining dust particles or scratches, and that’s it—the photos are ready for export.
Here are some scans that I’ve done using this method.
P.S.
From time to time, I hear people say they enjoy shooting film because they don’t need to edit their shots. This is clearly a misconception or a sign of ignorance. Most likely, those who make this claim have always relied on a lab to scan their film, meaning the lab handles the color correction. Even when printing a photo using an enlarger, the results can vary significantly from the same negative. There’s no such thing as the “real film look”; it’s all about shooting in a way that makes it easiest to achieve the desired result during printing or scanning.