Convert Film Negatives to Digital

Film negatives are, in many ways, the real treasure in a family's photographic archive. While prints fade, get handled, and deteriorate over the years, the negatives, tucked away in envelopes and forgotten, often retain far more detail and tonal range than the prints that were made from them. A good scan of a well-preserved negative will produce a sharper, richer image than scanning the corresponding print, because you are going back to the original source material.

Most people have 35mm negatives, which come in strips of four to six frames in paper or plastic sleeves. You may also have 120 (medium format) negatives, which are wider and produce larger images, or 110 format negatives from pocket cameras popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Colour negatives show the image in inverted and orange-masked form. They look nothing like the final picture until scanned and digitally inverted.

Negatives are susceptible to the same degradation as other photographic film: colour dye fading, base curl, fungal growth, and scratches from handling. The orange mask on colour negatives complicates scanning because it must be precisely subtracted during the inversion process. Cheap scanning software often gets this wrong, producing images with unnatural colour casts. Our professional film scanners handle this correctly, using calibrated profiles for different film stocks.

We scan negatives at high resolution using dedicated film scanners with infrared dust and scratch removal. Each frame is individually inverted, colour-corrected, and cropped. The result is a set of clean, properly balanced digital images that are often noticeably better than the original prints, particularly for negatives from the 1990s and 2000s where the prints have already started to fade.