Film Photography On Linux

"On Linux" is a phrase that just about every Linux user has tacked into the end of a Google search at some point during their Linux journey. Usually it'll be because I've forgotten the switches for tar - as a woman I'm not allowed to use man (it's xf, eXtract Files) - but sometimes you end up in a situation where being on Linux makes life a little more complicated. Such is the price of freedom, one supposes. And so, now that I'm at the stage in my film journey that I've bought a scanner (spoiler alert), I found myself searching "film negative workflow on linux".

Background

I'm an analogue photographer. I don't own a DSLR, or indeed any digital camera (unless you count the weak cameras of my smartphone), so at some point there's a digitisation step that has to happen so that I can convert my negatives into files on my computer. There's a number of methods that you can use to do the digitisation step. Many people who are already digital photographers will do lightbox DSLR scanning (taking photos of their negatives, set atop a lightbox, with their DSLR on a stand). It's more technical than this - you need the right lens and the right settings - but I won't go into detail on how to do that here. That's the easiest method, because most cameras have removable storage which you can plug into your machine and you've got your files. Skip to step 2.

Scanning, in the traditional sense (a flatbed and scanning something like a passport), is straightforward enough on Linux. There's a piece of software called SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) which has been around since before I was born that various desktop environment frontend packages use. And it just works. And that might in fact be fine if you have one of the recommended flatbed units (think Epson V600) and/or need to scan formats that aren't 35mm. The Epson (and its competitors) are supported in SANE, too.

However, there are some special 35mm scanners, and I was recommended a specific model by a friend: the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE. But there's no Linux driver available from Plustek. They supply Windows and Mac OS drivers, along with a copy of SilverFast SE (which is about the same age as SANE). Specialised film scanners are unfortunately a dead industry. The big players left the market as it shrank due to the adoption of digital cameras, so the only ones left are the flatbeds and the Plustek scanners. The software bundled with the scanners that are left are essentially abandoned, too. Pretty much all the cheap film scanners aren't worth talking about here. They're not recommended by anyone.

So; if you're on Linux, and you have a special scanner, you're SOL. Or are you?

Enter VueScan. This (sadly proprietary, but we can't win all our battles) software supports a vast number of scanners, with (I presume) reverse engineered drivers. And they have Linux binaries available! That was good enough for me; I decided that the Plustek would suit my available space (it's fairly petite) and that I would buy a VueScan licence. Helpfully, Hamrick offer a limited/ demo version of the software - you can simply download it and test it out with your setup before committing to buying. If you're below a certain age, we used to call this shareware. Some functions are limited, and it adds watermarks to actual saved files, but the rest of the program works flawlessly. Well, once I'd installed vuescan-bin from the AUR (I use Arch btw) it did. If you use any of the more normal distributions you can use the .deb, .rpm, or .tgz.

Actually Doing the Scanning Part

So we have our negatives, we have our scanner, and we have our scanning software stack. But now we must get some positives. That is, perform colour inversion. On Windows and Mac OS, it's more likely that you'll have Lightroom, and therefore you'll probably get pointed to Negative Lab Pro. The analogue community recommend NLP for a reason - the results are stunning. I refuse to give any money to Adobe (and I don't want to fiddle with WINE or cracked versions of Photoshop) so NLP is out of the question. What you'd normally do from here is scan DNGs and perform colour inversion in your editing software.

However, I'm comfortable in saying that VueScan's inversion is actually quite good, so we can get good results off the scanner.

Here's what I do for each film stock:

1. In VueScan, set your media B/W negative or Color negative (depending on what stock you're scanning). Any settings in the Color tab are up to you; Auto levels is probably fine/ what you want.

2. Load a strip of negatives into the scanner. Offset the frames on purpose (or use an empty frame/section of leader) so when you scan, you get a strip of unexposed but developed film. We're going to use that to lock down the settings in VueScan. Grab a Preview of the current frame.

3. Crop your selection down to the unexposed part of the film. That might be as small as the black strip in between frames - but you only want unexposed negative in the crop box. This is why we offset the frames, as it's easier to get a decent chunk of unexposed negative by using the film in between exposed frames. Hit Preview again, then Lock exposure.

4. Hit Preview again. Then, select Lock film base color. These will be your settings for every scan on this roll of film from now on. Don't change them!

5. Reseat your film strip in the holder so the frames aren't offset.

6. Preview a frame again, crop selection down to only select exposed negative (if you do select any unexposed frame edges you can just crop them out when editing the scan), and then go for a full-res scan.

7. Save out your full-res scan. I save TIFFs.

8. At this point, save your profile in VueScan. Then you can load this profile up any time you're scanning the same film stock.

If you're a pedant (or a Reddit commenter, but what's the difference), you may wish to perform this incantation for each roll of film you scan - I'm told by some that not every roll of film is created equal, or something. I'm happy with the results that I've yielded, though.

Editing

Okay, we're back to being able to use open source again. At this point you can take your scanned positives into whichever image editing software you prefer. darktable or RawTherapee are probably what you'll find being touted as the top options here, but trying to use the UI in darktable makes me want to jump out of a window and I wasn't ever able to get a decent positive using the negadoctor module. RawTherapee also has a UI that gives me nightmares but it's at least somewhat nicer to use.

If you scanned negatives out to DNG, what you're supposed to do is use one of the negative workflow modules: negadoctor in darktable, or Film Negative in Rawtherapee - but they're actually not very intuitive or even good compared to my VueScan workflow. If you're in the same situation I'm in and you're screaming at your screen because I'm doing it wrong and you find those modules easy to get great results with, email me!

darktable has been forked by Aurélien Pierre, an ex-maintainer, into Ansel, ostensibly a better version of darktable. Pierre has written a scathing report on the problems of darktable: crashing into the wall in slow-motion, which sounds about right for open source software dealing with graphics or images (users of GIMP, you can nod along at home). vkdt may be the answer, according to Pierre. Vulkan Darktable (not a Vulkan rewrite of darktable) has a node-graph pipeline which you'll recognise if you use Blender. However, it's very prototypical at the moment. Maybe in the future this will be the best option for photography in the FLOSS world. Right now, I'm sticking with Ansel, which is like darktable on crack. It's like Aurélien knows what he's doing, or something.

It's worth noting that there's no 'true' colours of a film stock and it's all very dependent on the scanner and the inversion's interpretation of the colour. This is not just me attempting to cover up poor scans, film is 'just film' and was really not intended for the scanning process - but as we want to digitise instead of making prints in the darkroom, here we are. In my experience, underexposure is much harder to correct for in post - you're just going to end up with a lot of noise and harsh grain. So when in doubt, overexpose. ;)

Closing Thoughts

I expected scanning to be a bit of a pain, and truthfully getting to a point where I'm happy with my workflow has been stressful. If you're not a huge nerd like me and you don't intend to be primarily an analogue photographer, it might be worth just paying for scanning with your local lab. With the amount of film that I shoot, getting a scanner and a VueScan licence was cheaper long-term than paying for scanning on every roll.

Since I started writing this post, I've bought a medium format camera (a Zenza Bronica ETRSi) and my scanner only holds 35mm film stock. Maybe it's time to research 120 film scanners...