A Cheaper Way to Shoot Slide Film + App Updates

Last week, Eastman Kodak Company announced new boxes for their highly regarded Ektachrome E100 slide film.

Along with the design, the factory had effectively cut out the middleman — this is certainly great news for Kodak. Some photographers proclaimed that cheaper film is around the corner.

I haven’t seen evidence of lower film prices on the new Kodak films across all retailers yet, although in some cases, there may be deals. Just a week prior, our community was freaking out over potential severe price hikes due to rapidly rising silver costs. So, which is it?

While I don’t have a crystal ball, prices always go up². Check out some vintage ads to get an idea of how things have changed (or haven’t).

But I’m not here to complain about how money works. Instead, I’d like to share a technique for developing slide film at home economically so that the Ektachrome price tag doesn’t sting as much, and introduce an upcoming app update that will make scanning film easier (and maybe cheaper, too).

In this newsletter: Lifetime GOLD membership giveaway! How to develop slide film at home for less. An easier way to invert film negatives is coming. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

¹ — @Nesster on Flickr.

² — The prices of film are not much different today than they were in the 1960s. For example, the 1984 price of $7.12 for Kodak Ektachrome 100 is $22.29 in 2026 dollars, which is close to the current average of $23.88 across various stores. Whereas the 1990 film prices were higher than they are today!

Lifetime GOLD membership giveaway!

If you aren’t yet a GOLD subscriber, here’s a little incentive for you: in celebration of the 200-year anniversary of photography, I’m giving away forever-free lifetime membership passes!

To enter, you just need to be an existing member or sign up.

I will announce a random winner on the last Tuesday of every month in 2026. If it’s you, I’ll apply a perpetual 100% discount to your account!

How to develop slide film at home for less.

Slide film chemicals can add costs in unexpected ways. Thankfully, you don’t need an E-6 kit to develop slide film at home.

Black-and-white developers, such as Rodinal, can last almost indefinitely; unfortunately, E-6 kits have about two months’ worth of life in them before exhaustion. This means you’d have to shoot ~16 rolls of the most expensive type of film within sixty days. That’s at least $320 worth of rolls plus the chemistry.

C-41 kits have about the same shelf life, but there are several great colour-negative options selling for about $10/roll. This cuts monthly expenditure in half, and adds many more options (compared to just 3 for fresh slide film). Plus, given that colour-negative film generally has wider exposure latitude, you may get more keepers.

Best of all, C-41 is the easiest place to start if you want to learn home film development.

It’s possible to develop slide film in C-41 chemicals — and many people do it with great success. Unfortunately, this does not yield positives; worse: modern Ektachrome is particularly sensitive to cross-processing, which can result in overexposures, botched colours, and other problems. It will not look like the classic X-Pro digital filters, and it will cost at least $20 to find out.

But what if you didn’t need an E-6 kit to develop colour-positives and weren’t beholden to shooting 16 rolls of slide film in just two months? The C-41 reversal method, described in this month’s member-exclusive article, is a little-known solution to the high costs of shooting slide film.

C-41 reversal adds just one step to the standard colour-negative process, making it chemically identical to E-6. Like the standard reversal process, it develops exposed silver halides, re-exposes undeveloped ones, and bleaches the highlights to reveal a positive.

There are some differences between the C-41 reversal and E-6 processes. For example, one step involves removing half-developed film and re-exposing it. The E-6 process does this chemically, but I’ve really enjoyed previewing my images before I could even see the final developed results.

See the full explanation, samples, and development formulas here.

An easier way to invert film negatives is coming.

I started working on film Q five years ago when I realized that the obscure nature of the algorithms powering inversion apps hid the crucial step in my image-making process.

The same apps also use a slew of controls intended to duplicate or gamify the functionality of dedicated software that already exists for this purpose (i.e., Photoshop, Gimp, etc.) — adding to the confusion.

Looking at the scans inverted with the opaque software algorithms, I couldn’t tell whether the images I got were overexposed, had other issues, or if the software just messed up the inversion. Batch inversions were a drag.

film Q is my attempt to fix those issues. This web-based app uses the same simple inversion technique as described in this article. It does not do any colour correction, giving the freedom to use familiar tools for the job (this article explains how) without the clutter of sliders and options that may or may not do what they say. And it can invert negatives in batches really well.

However, the app still relies on Dropbox to source and archive your scans. It’s convenient for my use case, but I understand that it may require installing an unfamiliar app and possibly subscribing to another service.

I am now building a browser-based drag-and-drop experience that does not rely on Dropbox.

Once complete, it will accept a variety of camera RAW formats, 16-bit TIFF files, PNGs, HEIC phone scans, and more. It’ll work on any device with a browser (a phone, a vintage PC, a Linux computer, a Chromebook, whatever). It won’t take any of your system’s resources. And there will be nothing for you to install.

I’m hoping to start testing this update in March.