Shoot-scan-convert, my negative digitisation workflow

Catchy post title, eh? I’ve been contemplating whether to explain my workflow for a long time. I was put off doing it for a number of reasons, not least because I am certainly no expert in any of this. If you’re going to scan/photograph and process your own negatives, it’s an extremely personal process with so much down to personal preference. For the most part, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. With a few exceptions which I will mention when we get to them.

This is going to be a long read and will be quite in-depth, but I hope it can benefit everyone, from someone who has no idea where to begin, to seasoned experts who may pick up a few tips for streamlining or enhancing their processes. Grab a coffee and settle down to follow along with my workflow. Remember, all of this is how I do it. The most important thing for you is consistency, so once you create your process, make notes so you can do it exactly the same each time.

Overview of steps

1. Setup and preparatory steps
2. Photographing the negatives
3. Importing and cataloging
4. Conversion and editing
5. Exporting

So what do I use?

The first stage involves getting the negatives into digital form, and for this there are two main ways: take photos of them with a digital camera or use some sort of scanner. Plenty of scanners are available, either general document scanners with negative scanning attachments, or dedicated negative scanners. I chose the digital camera route as this had several advantages. I have very limited space at home, so an additional scanner didn’t seem the sensible option when I already had a full-frame digital sensor in my (albeit dated) DSLR.

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I have a Canon EOS 6D and I bought a secondhand Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG HSM Macro Lens (Canon EF mount) lens. A true 1:1 macro lens is quite important if you want good results, but before this I was using extension tubes with some success.

Macro photography is separately something that I’ve wanted to try out for several years but I could never warrant spending the money on a dedicated lens, so I feel like buying the macro lens was better value for money now that I can go and try that out one day too.

The negative plane and the sensor plane must be absolutely parallel, so a mini spirit level is a great idea, you can simply place it on the LCD screen to check the camera is level. If they’re not level, then parts of the negative will be out of focus because of the very low depth of field.

A solid tripod is absolutely critical, I use this one from K&F Concept which can easily support a fairly heavy camera and lens combination (and even my mammoth Mamiya RZ67). Having the transverse centre column is really useful for positioning the camera directly over the negative.

Moving down to the negatives, you need a backlight and a holder. Several years ago when I started to mess around with DIY photography, I made myself a basic lightbox from a shoebox with a hole for a remote flash at one end and a hole with paper pockets as negative holders at the other end. If you really want to do this on the cheap, this will work, but be prepared for plenty of experimentation. The biggest cause of problems I had back then was not diffusing the light sufficiently.

Anyway, back to the current setup. A light surface with a Colour Rendering Index (CRI) of 95 or more should be used. I chose the Kaiser Fototechnik Slimlite Plano and there are plenty of other choices available. Really, the surface doesn’t need to be much bigger than the largest negative that you’d like to capture. But if I had to buy a replacement, I would like one that’s large enough to lay out all the negatives from a roll to create a single ‘contact sheet’ image, but this isn’t necessary.

Next, I use a Pixl-latr device as a negative frame. When I was looking for something that would support both 35mm and medium format, there weren’t a lot of sensibly priced options available, but that seems to have changed a bit now. By the way, if you’re in the UK, use Analogue Wonderland for both films and developing, you can also get a free roll of film when you make a purchase if you use that referrer link.

I know, I know. Four monitors is greedy, but two of them have switchable inputs for my company laptop when working from home. This scanning setup fits neatly on my desk, I can reach the keyboard and mouse for the basic controls I need for controlling the remote shooting. When stored away, it all takes up very little space.

Photographing the negatives

Next, let’s get into the actual workflow. I setup my tripod on my desk in front of my PC. I need to be able to see my screens and I need to get to my mouse. I always shoot tethered with the photo output directly to a dedicated ‘tethered_shoot’ folder on my PC, but you don’t need to do this. I use the EOS Utility from Canon, which allows me to do ‘liveview’ remote shooting from my PC.

A top tip here, I use the 2s delay setting on the camera and trigger the shutter from the EOS Utility with a click on the mouse. This gives me enough time to ensure I’m not touching the desk to minimise movement.

The live view allows me to select an area where there is sufficient contrast in the negative for the camera to focus. Make sure you do refocus for every frame; even a 1mm difference in distance from the negative to the sensor when shooting full macro and the loss of focus is significant because the depth of field is so shallow (check out “focus stacking” in macro photography).

For the camera settings, always shoot in RAW format and at your camera’s native ISO. On mine, that is ISO 100. I use Av mode with the lens at f/11. Usually lenses have a sweet spot which is somewhere in the middle of their aperture range providing the best sharpness and least distortion etc. On my setup this typically results in a shutter speed of around 0.5s depending on the negative content, but with this setup, whatever speed it decides is fine. As you should generally do when using a solid tripod, turn off any optical image stabilisation switches on the lens.

With everything in place and configured, the easy bit is clicking the shutter button for each negative one by one. Use the live view to ensure the negative is in the frame and nearly filling it. Also, make sure there’s a small amount of unexposed negative in each frame, we will need this later.

I make extra use of my multiple monitor setup as you’ll see from the photos. Having the live view shooting window on one screen, a full screen preview of the last-captured image on one screen, and an Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) view of the “tethered shoot” output folder on another allows you to count files and see thumbnails, but extra screens are by no means necessary. If you’re using one screen, arrange your windows so you can see your shooting settings and your liveview. Size the last-frame preview so it’s a small box in one corner, this is really useful if you get distracted as you can see the last negative you photographed.

If you’re digitising several rolls of film in a session, I’d recommend doing each stage for all films in one go. Postage costs likely mean you’ve sent several films off for developing at the same time. While your setup is in place, get everything into your tethered_shoot folder then you can get the camera and paraphernalia out of the way. If you like, fire a blank frame with the lens cap on after each roll, then when importing later, you’ve got an easy-to-spot blank image to identify the start of the next roll.

The screen recording above shows positioning the negatives, choosing focus points with an average of dark and light and decent contrast to allow focusing, then triggering the shutter with a two second delay.

Import

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a big subject. At this stage, personal preference is even greater than before. If you don’t have a structured system in place, now is the time to create one. DAM is much more than just the folder you choose for saving your photos. Whole books have been written on it and it is far too big to cover here, but key components are how you decide to organise your digital photo files, how you work on them, how you export and publish them, how you track their usage, and most importantly, how you back them up. My work background is IT and I have done it for a long time. Backups are ingrained into the very way I work. Backups are so important that I’m going to revisit them in more detail later in this post.

The file system

For importing and storing photos, I have a defined structure and I use Adobe Lightroom to manage them all. We will get on to “Negative Lab Pro” later, which at the time of writing. is only available as plugin for Lightroom Classic. I separate negative scans from my main digital imports, so I have a dedicated parent folder titled “Film Scans” for these. For standard digital photos, I have a parent folder for each Year, then inside that a folder for each month, and inside that, a folder for each day. This is great when you’re dealing with large numbers of photos from busy photo shoots, but Lightroom also makes it work if you’ve got far fewer images. In the Lightroom Library view, if you select a parent folder, such as a month, it will display all the photos under that in a single scrolling gallery view. You can even use Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac) to select different individual folders. In fact, you may notice in some screenshots later that my “Film Scans” folder name is actually prefixed with “0000”, this is just so that the Film Scans folder appears before the dated folder that I normally use for standard digital imports.

My digitised negatives are stored a little differently though, and this method makes sense to me because I’m dealing with smaller quantities of files. Each roll of film is stored in its own folder with a fixed naming convention. Whatever you decide to use, be consistent. Write down your rules on a bit of paper and keep it near your computer. When including dates in folder names, always go from biggest timespan to the smallest, i.e. YYYY-MM-DD, so that in folder view, sorting by name will always work (there’s a good reason there are international ISO standards for formatting dates!). My folder name convention is as follows:

YYYY-MM-DD_RNN_CAMERA_FILMSTOCK

• where YYYY-MM-DD = existing date of folder, always date it was digitised
• where RNN = roll number with two digits, start at R01 for each day of scans
• where CAMERA = Camera used, no spaces
• where FILMSTOCK = Film Brand/Stock used, no spaces

These folder naming conventions are in addition to tagging images. Tagging is a very powerful feature and I must admit I don’t use it enough. When I import each roll, I do also add the camera and the film stock as tags to help with searching in Lightroom but I don’t add much beyond that. I really should. Incidentally, Lightroom has facial recognition features, and the more you name the faces in photos, the better it seems to get at automatically adding names in the future. If you do a lot of street photography, you may want to skip the face recognition because every new photo will give it many new faces!

Let’s take a look at the exact steps I follow when doing an initial import.

Open up the Import dialog, set set the Source to the “tethered_shoot” folder (which is wherever your remote shooting app uses as its destination):

I have created an import preset that pre-applies a couple of standard tags, and because I always capture using tethered shooting which saves directly to a folder on my computer, my Import preset is also set to move rather than copy.

You may notice that the Import dialog box is a workflow with three distinct columns, source on the left, destination on the right, and action in the middle. When I import, I uncheck all photos first, then I select my first roll as you’ll see in the screenshot below, and allow it to import to a simple dated folder, eg 2025-11-15. After that import is complete and Lightroom has finished its work on the folder, I rename the folder following the naming convention I previously discussed. Only perform file actions within Lightroom, otherwise it’s easy to lose photos where the file system doesn’t match what Lightroom thinks is there. The folder structure is never accessed foutside of Lightroom; all actions, browsing, searching, copying etc, are done exclusively using the Lightroom interface.

Once you’ve renamed that folder, repeat the Import process for each roll of film. If you prefer, you can import all rolls together, then split them out into folders afterwards, but I always import one roll at a time because I apply the basic keyword tags to the roll on import. Although I identify the camera and film stock in the folder names, I do also apply these as tags to the images too.

Once the import is complete, the first thing I do is trigger a Lightroom Catalog backup by exiting Lightroom. My catalog backup settings are set to prompt every time Lightroom exists, if I’ve made changes, I allow it to make a backup. Then I trigger a manual run of my PC’s backup schedule. Just to reach this stage has already been time consuming, and I don’t want to have to repeat the whole scanning and importing process so getting a backup as soon as possible is important (make it a habitual part of your workflow, you’ll thank yourself one day!).

Processing

I’m only going to cover the basic negative-to-positive conversion here, standard photo manipulation in Lightroom, Photoshop and the like is very extensively covered elsewhere. While I am trying to concentrate on the slightly more niche aspects, there are plenty of excellent resources all over the internet on every single aspect of this entire workflow, I am trying to give a complete picture of one way that one user is doing it.

I use the superb Negative Lab Pro (NLP) plugin which is only available for Adobe Lightroom Classic. Convert one roll of negatives at a time, but before we do, this is one of those exceptions where you really should do both of these steps before conversion. We need to set the white balance and we need to crop the frame. Earlier I mentioned ensuring there’s a bit of unexposed negative in each of your digital photos; use this to set the white balance. In fact, you can probably enable auto-sync and set it on one because it should be the same across the entire film. The reason for this is the NLP software can cancel out the colour cast by the negative itself.

Next, crop each frame so there are no borders. This is also important because it will bias NLP’s analysis of the image. Depending on how you photograph the negatives, if you don’t move your Pixl-latr and lighttable, you may also be able to auto-sync the crop across the whole roll as well. However I do find that positioning at the photographing stage is more efficient by sliding the whole lighttable.

In the screen recording above, I’m in Develop mode in Lightroom on my first unconverted negative image. Black strips at the top and bottom of the image are the Pixl-latr negative holder. The orange strips down the left and right are part of the gap on the negative between two frames. This is where I click to set the white balance using the pipette selector (keyboard shortcut ‘W’ enables the pipette and allows you to click). You’ll see the strips down the left hand side lose their hue. That hue will vary depending on the film stock you’re using. If you’re digitising black and white negatives you don’t need to set the white balance. Instead, you set your ‘Colour Model’ in Negative Lab Pro to B+W. Next in the video, I crop down to the negative itself (‘R’ on the keyboard, perform the crop, then ‘Enter’ on the keyboard), removing all parts of the unexposed negative and the Pixl-latr holder.

Once I’ve prepared each image like this, I select all the images in the roll and open NLP. One tip here – check that Auto sync isn’t enabled in your Develop view at this stage if you have been using it for whitebalance or cropping. At a most basic level, all you need to do in NLP is choose Digital Camera as your source and then click the Convert button.

Once it has analysed the images, it allows you to step through each image and apply presets, but the basic conversion is now complete and you can click Apply.

Once you’ve finished your work with NLP, if your images in are raw format, you’ll find that the controls in Lightroom are inverted, remember that the raw image data is still in negative. You can also reopen NLP to get back to these edits. Once you’ve finished your work with NLP on an image, you can generate a positive copy to continue working with the standard Lightroom controls.

With NLP installed, there is an extra Export preset available to you so you can select your images, choose Export then click one of the ‘NLP – Positive Copy‘ exports:

When using this preset, a TIFF version will be generated in the same folder, and will be added to your Lightroom catalog stacked with the original version:

On this copy, you can then perform any additional edits that you prefer to do with the standard Lightroom controls as you would with any other photo and they will behave in the expected way.

Negative storage

Not everyone keeps their negatives, but I do. If you do, make sure to use good quality archival sleeves such as these for 35mm and these for medium format. These include a paper spine that you can write on, so make sure to include at least your scan date YYYY-MM-DD and roll number RNN (how you named your folders earlier) so that you can find the corresponding negatives for each Lightroom folder. I also write the camera and the film stock too. If you want to use a lab to do an enlarged print, you will want to send them the original negative so you need to be able to find it! I store mine in these storage binders.

Exporting/using the results

This is pretty much out of scope here because there are simply too many options and use cases depending on how I’m choosing to use the images. I’ve created a couple of Export presets in Lightroom that let me output files to particular dimensions. I typically use social media (Instagram, Facebook) from my phone rather than my computer, so my ‘Social Media’ export preset has its destination as a local Dropbox folder. I use a free Dropbox account, which gives me enough storage to easily sync to the Dropbox app in my phone, and then retrieve the images to my standard camera roll.

Equipment used

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Tripod: K&F Concept Camera tripod
Camera body: Canon EOS 6D
Camera lens: Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM Macro Lens for Canon DSLR (this is the EF mount version that I use, Nikon version also available: Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM Macro Lens for Nikon DSLR)
Spirit level: Hotshoe spirit level
Light table: Kaiser Fototechnik Slimlite Plano
Film scanning mask: Pixl-latr
Cataloging/editing software: Adobe Lightroom Classic
Negative conversion software: Negative Lab Pro
Negative sleeves: for 24×36 (35mm) and for medium format (120) and a storage binder

Summing up

First, I apologise for a very long winded, and somewhat technical article. I am making big assumptions here; the very fact that you’re doing film photography at all means I can have a good guess that you’ve got a reasonable understanding of photography. The fact that you’ve undertaken to establish a whole workflow for doing this all yourself rather than paying a lab to send you some scans does imply at least some technical ability. Let me know your thoughts, any feedback or questions will allow me to revisit this and adjust the wording as needed. Lastly, if you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

A footnote on backup plans

You see it all too often in social media community groups – someone has lost their phone and they’re hoping someone has seen it because it’s got irreplaceable family or pet photos. Someone’s laptop died because they spilled water on it, now the disk doesn’t work even when they took it out and connected it to another computer.

Let’s be real here. Cloud storage services can be really cheap. If you use an iPhone, monthly iCloud plans start from less than the cost of a cup of coffee and provide fully automated cloud backups.

You can never have enough backups. I won’t delve into the details of my backup processes too much, but a “3-2-1 backup” policy is a really good practice to follow: three copies of your data, two different types of media, plus one off-site. My primary off-site backup is iDrive. It has a set-and-forget backup app that you install on your computer, then you set your schedule and what you want to backup/exclude and just leave it to do its job. It has quite generous cloud storage options, I’m on the 5TB option for around $99 USD per year. One nice feature that the privay-conscious will like is that you can encrypt your backups with an encryption key and you can choose to keep that key to yourself. The caveat of course is that you are unable to use the iDrive website to browse the contents of your backups unless you provide your key to the web interface.

Also, an untested backup is not a backup. When was the last time you tried restoring something from one of your backups? If you haven’t verified that you can restore from your backups, then they shouldn’t be considered as backups. I’ve seen this myself. The backup jobs have been running regularly, from a process point of view, they’re doing the right things, the backup destination is getting new files. But then you need to restore something, and for any number of reasons, the restore failed and the backup was not recoverable. I’ll leave you with those thoughts; if you don’t have a backup strategy, research and create one now.