film Q, Analog.Cafe’s film inversion app, now supports iPhone “scans.”
I understand there are other ways to achieve a similar result. However, film Q can produce higher-quality inversions, and it works across more devices and operating systems than any other film inversion app. At least that’s what I tell myself when I attempt to justify several days of integration hell I went through to enable this feature.
Apple’s High Efficiency Image File Format supports 10-bit colour depth, which can potentially produce better scans. However, most film inversion apps either rely on software such as Adobe Lightroom or iOS libraries to convert HEIC files to JPEGs (which can reduce image quality) or don’t work with the format at all. For example, you cannot open images shot on an iPhone with VueScan unless you convert them to JPEG in another app.
To squeeze all the quality out of the iPhone “scans,” an app must integrate with a library that reads Apple’s image format and transfers all that data without compressing it further. The challenge is that this format is not natively supported in most environments.
There are open-source tools for decoding HEIC files, but they can be difficult to integrate into an existing app. That’s why you may find that your iPhone scans are unreadable by desktop apps and even web apps, like Lomography’s DigitaLiza Lab and other free/open-source film inversion tools.
In the case of film Q, it took several days to find the right configuration of specialized software packages and deployment strategies for native HEIC support. Uniquely, film Q runs on remote servers, which brings several conveniences but also challenges, as it must operate within specific constraints and integrate with a small swarm of other servers to process hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of image data.
Well, it’s finally done.
Released today, film Qv1.0.0-beta.21 is one of several updates coming to the web app this year:
I think the app’s ability to natively read iPhone HEIC format will become especially useful once I finish this project: analog.cafe/comments/83jw — which should make inverting film on any device as simple as dropping a file into a website without having to download any other app (no Dropbox required).
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I’ve noticed that some of you may be having issues inverting negatives on Nikon Z cameras — the solution is to turn off High Efficiency (HE) or High Efficiency* (HE*) RAW compression on the camera. Support for this compression is in the works; however, the timeline is entirely up to the kind folks at LibRaw, who supply the entire world of software manufacturers (including folks who make VueScan and virtually all open-source apps) free of charge.
The open-source community is doing amazing things for human progress.
Dmitri