Education · August 10, 2020

How to upload your film photography to Unsplash

So you’ve shot your first roll of film… now what?

Annie Spratt
Annie Spratt
Image by Barna Kovács

When I started shooting film last year, I started noticing film photography more and more on Unsplash, which is how the Film Topic came to be created. And now, as we celebrate the best of Film throughout this month, I've put together some tips on how to get started. Whether you send off your film to be developed for you, or you’d like to try your hand at scanning in your film negatives yourself, here’s a roundup of a few different ways to get your film photos on Unsplash.

NB: Prices shown are in GBP and reflect my experience in the UK

Developing

Options:

  • Mailing to a film development lab
  • Visiting a local photographic store that offers a developing service
  • Developing film yourself


Mailing to a film development lab or visiting a local photographic store that offers a developing service

Cost: Approx £7-14, prints and scans additional costs

Having your film developed by a third party is the preferred choice by most new and many experienced film photographers. Pro’s include guaranteed quality negatives (as long as you exposed your shots correctly) and less effort than home developing. There are different options available including not only developing but also ordering prints or scans of your images.

Turnaround times for labs vary, personally it’s usually taken around 7 working days when I’ve used this type of service.


Developing film yourself

Developing film yourself is relatively simple and it’s satisfying to follow your images journey from conception through to holding the developed negative in your hand.

Although home developing takes a little time, anywhere between 15 and 40 minutes, it’s much quicker than mailing off your film and waiting for it to be sent back.

If you're looking to start developing your film at home, here are a few good tutorials to get started:

Scanning

Options:

  • Paying a film development lab
  • Scanning negatives yourself
  • Taking photos of negatives with a digital camera


Paying a film development lab

Cost: Price per film Standard res (approx 2 megapixel) £5, Hi res (12 megapixel) £15 (approx)

When you send off film to a developing lab there are different options you can select, ordering scans of your images is one. If you plan on uploading the images to Unsplash, be sure to get hi res scans so that they meet our minimum size requirement (5 megapixels).

Hi res scans and prints are surprisingly expensive (and the sole reason I invested in a scanner). For context the cost in the UK for prints and hi res scans per film comes to around £30 per film (on top of the developing cost). Which is why I scan in the negatives myself at home and print them out using a home printer.

Scanning negatives yourself with a hi res scanner

Cost: One off investment of £100-£200

In my opinion this is the most long term cost effective option. You can back up the scans online and also re-scan them in the future from the negatives should you encounter the dreaded hard-drive failure.

I use the Epson Perfection V600, which can scan both 35mm and medium format negatives to a max resolution of  6400 x 9600 dpi. A decent scanner will cost around £100 - £200, but if you shoot a lot of film it will pay for itself.

Taking photos of negatives with a digital camera

Cost: One off investment of £150 upwards (providing you have a digital camera)

This is another do-it-at-home option, that’s a little more complicated that scanning. Essentially you pop your negative on a light tile and take a digital photo zoomed in on each image. Light tiles can vary in cost. I have a square light panel that I bought from a DIY store for £35 that works just fine, but other (most costly) photography specific ones are available such as this one.

For black and white film, you upload the digital images to Photoshop and hit CTRL + I to invert the image - and booooom - you have your own hi-res digital copy.

For color negatives the process is slightly different. I use the Lightroom plugin Negative Lab Pro (also does b+w images). The cost of this plugin in $99 USD, but a free trial is available. This plugin allows you to apply slightly different color profiles to the converted negatives too.

Enhancing

Let's Enhance

Cost: $12USD/month for 100 images

Whether you previously ordered standard res scans of past rolls of film that you'd now like to upload to Unsplash or you'd simply like to remove a little grain from your final photo – Let's Enhance is a great way to enlarge, colour correct, and retouch your work.

They are on a mission is to make image editing simple, automatic and accessible to anyone, and their tools are specifically designed to save you time and effort for every type of image you work with. Colorize can be combined together with Smart Enhance or Photo 2.0 upscaling algorithms to recover colors, eliminate grain and restore details while increasing the overall image resolution.

Plus, Let’s Enhance is giving the Unsplash community 30% off for 3 months to celebrate Film this August.

Digitising old photos

Many of us have old real (physical format!) photos and digitising them can be a great way to share them. Recently I digitised my parents family photo album, and it was great to be able to share those digital files with my brother and wider family, everyone now having a copy of the important images of their childhood.

You can use any flatbed scanner to scan in old photos but if you have a digital camera simply taking a photo of the photo is a much quicker with as good, if not better results than scanning (depending on your camera).

The key is to avoid light glare on the photo, I use a piece of card that I move about until any light bouncing off the photo is gone and then shoot. Depending on how good you are at getting the photo in frame you may like to crop the final image using any online image editor. It really is as simple as that!


For the month of August, we're celebrating analog photography on Unsplash. Submit your best film photos to our Film Topic for a chance to be featured.

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