The cheap ones on Amazon have uneven lighting, which, of course, creates uneven exposures in your negatives. The second most critical piece of equipment is the light source used to scan the negatives. The second most important digital camera film scan piece is the light source Get yours on Amazon for the best price here. Despite being one of the cheapest macro lenses on the market, the Sigma Art 70mm Macro lens outperforms, or performs on par with other lenses that cost thousands of dollars. My personal favorite lens for scanning negatives is the Sigma Art 70mm Macro lens. If you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter what your resolution is, you’re just going to have very good resolution of a bad scan.”

“Having a really good 1:1 macro lens with a modern UV coating, and good coating on it, is I think the first most important thing to get. Lenses with extension tubes, or older macro lenses are all prone to flaring, which creates color casts and reduces image sharpness. But if there’s one piece of equipment that is the most important, it’s the Macro lens.

The macro lens is the most important part of the DSLR film scanning setupĪccording to Nate, most bad results come down to the negative scanning setup. Ribsy’s video made from our chat with Nate from Negative Lab Pro. Here’s my 11 biggest takeaways from our chat. Negative Lab Pro changed that by integrating a method of converting negatives into positives using Lightroom Classic, which is the default editing and cataloging program used by photographers everywhere.īut even Negative Lab Pro has some quirks, and is notoriously difficult to understand off the start. Last week I was able to sit down with YouTube’s Ribsy and Nate from Negative Lab Pro to have a chat about how the program works, and what users can do to make the best scans possible. Scanning apps like the Epson Scan, and Silverfast make it practically impossible to create consistent results, even when two negatives were shot in the same light on the same roll. This piece of software that works inside of Lightroom has been the key to making professional results on film accessible to photographers everywhere.īefore Negative Lab Pro, there wasn’t a way to create consistent results using the scanning software available at home. One of the best tools that exists for film photographers right now is Negative Lab Pro.

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