#filmscan

Chemvert is a new stand-alone, subscription-free scanning software for macOS, compatible with all major scanners and digital camera RAW formats.

This weekend, I got to try Chemlooks’ 163MB software demo with my Nikon Coolscan TIFF scans.

The most impressive part of this app is that, unlike NLP, it doesn’t need any Adobe product to work. It is entirely stand-alone, and it’s possible to complete the inversion and do the most necessary adjustments right there.

Chemvert costs $89.99 as a one-time payment and “includes all minor updates and at least two major updates,” as specified by Tim, one of the app creators in our email exchange. This is an excellent alternative for those wishing to ditch Adobe and the monthly payments that come with it.

You can t…

I’ve added new spaces on Analog.Cafe, where I’ll be organizing some of my thoughts on film photography.

You’ll probably notice #editorial🔥 the most since it’s where I write about product launches and share announcements like this. Comments under this tag may end up in your RSS feed, Community Letters¹, or you may hear about them from me on Mastodon and Bluesky.

A #video🍿 tag lists all the comments with a YouTube link. I’ve added a whole bunch of these, including this epic trilogy of Kodak factory tours: analog.cafe/comments/tnq0.

#gas is a fun one about cameras — you can participate by tagging your comments with #gas or visiting analog.cafe/comments/tag/g….

There’s a lot you can do to clean up even the worst examples of scratches on film.

I’ve recently fixed an image that came out appallingly bad. I needed it for my review article (analog.cafe/r/peak-design-…) and couldn’t re-shoot it in time.

Cleaning this frame up was a gruelling process, but I wanted to document it on video to give some context for what the process may be like for whoever is about to attempt something similar.

I’ve compressed about three hours of my recorded work into this 15-second video: youtube.com/shorts/F-6kp5t….

#filmscan #video🍿

This photo of the Kowa E camera I reviewed recently is my first attempt at focus stacking with Photoshop.

The process is very simple if you have the app. There are just two steps:

1) Edit > Auto-Align Layers

2) Edit > Auto-Blend Layers

In my cas…

Just watched grainydays (Jason) push Portra 800 +1 to EI 1600. He didn’t seem to like his results, but I think this film is still worth a push if needed. If you do that, I advise using better scanning techniques and beware of the sharp falloff in the shadows.

Here’s his video: youtube.com/watch?v=w2iR7Y…

I happened to have recently shot mine pushed +2 stops to EI 3200: analog.cafe/r/kodak-portra…. Coincidentally, I also used XPan with it (reviewed here: analog.cafe/r/hasselblad-x…), which indeed needed those extra stops of light sensitivity in the dusky Vancouver winter.

Whereas some shots didn’t work out as well as I hoped they would, I had no trouble getting rid of the colour casts and haven’t found the grain that bad in my scans.

Getting better Polaroid Reclaimed Blue scans (brighter highlights, Newton rings gone, and sharper image) by removing the transparent plastic layer.

Inspired by the recent In An Instant video (youtube.com/watch?v=DZxk1i…), I was playing around with my Reclaimed Blue (analog.cafe/r/polaroid-rec…) frames, trying to create a transparency.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. I tried making one out of a frame exposed 10 minutes before, which ended up having the emulsion and a lot of the white crumbly stuff stuck to the front of the frame. But the film that I exposed about two hours prior ended up splitting in a way that let me remove just the clear front plastic cleanly (to do this, I followed the technique described here: analog.cafe/r/polaroid-emu…)

I happened to have scanned the frame before opening it up and I made another scan with the clear plastic gone, which I then overlayed digitally to compare the results (attached). On the left is the scan with the plastic gone and on the right is the original frame.

I’ve been testing ORWO Wolfen NC 500 for months, trying to understand how to use this film best. It demonstrated promising results in promotional samples ( analog.cafe/r/film-photogr… ) and in some examples mentioned by other reviewers.

But the testers’ feedback is very inconsistent — this film seems to have impressed them at one point and disappointed at another.

This film seems to shine in specific light/scenes/applications.

I’ve got results that looked like expired Portra: excellent skin tone reproduction with chunky grain and low saturation. Hoping to find a strategy to make the most of this film consistenly.