I stopped shooting film decades ago, only recently got a full-frame digital camera and also a nice rig for scanning my old slides. Lately I've been contemplating putting my film camera back to work. But I'm not sure what direction to go next.
We recently found and undeveloped roll of Gold 200 and had a lab develop and scan it. The scans had good color but only marginal sharpness. I'm not sure if it was just low-quality scanning or because the film was 20+ years old. They sent me the roll of negatives so I tried scanning one of the images. For years I've been using Corel PaintShop Pro X which has a "Negative Image" conversion which I applied. The result was a recognizable image but with a strong green overlay. PSPro also has a "Faded Image" tool which I tried. That helped some. I played around with other color tweaks but could not duplicate what came from the lab. So I wonder if it was the film or incorrect PSPro negative conversion. I see that GIMP can do some negative conversion also, haven't tried it on those negatives.
If there is a reasonably lightweight image processing program I might try it. Don't want to spend much (or any) money besides the film and processing until I decide it's something I really want to do. I have Darktable but didn't see an obvious way forward with it.
Alternatively I could pick up shooting slides again. It's been decades since I pulled out the slide projector but at least it's a way to use the slides themselves, and I can always scan them for digital viewing anyway. With print film I can't do anything with them except scan and convert. Well, I could print them but that's not a direction I want to go, don't even have a color printer. Unless a printed image is put on display, viewing it is an activity done by at most only a few people at a time. Viewing slides is a social occasion, and digital images can be shared and viewed on many different devices.
So I think I know the answer but I'd still like to try processing negatives. Any recommendations?
Thanks.
I stopped shooting film decades ago, only recently got a full-frame digital camera and also a nice rig for scanning my old slides. Lately I've been contemplating putting my film camera back to work. But I'm not sure what direction to go next.
We recently found an undeveloped roll of Gold 200 and had a lab develop and scan it. The scans had good color but only marginal sharpness. I'm not sure if it was just low-quality scanning or because the film was 20+ years old. They sent me the roll of negatives so I tried scanning one of the images. For years I've been using Corel PaintShop Pro X which has a "Negative Image" conversion which I applied. The result was a recognizable image but with a strong green overlay. PSPro also has a "Faded Image" tool which I tried. That helped some. I played around with other color tweaks but could not duplicate what came from the lab. So I wonder if it was the film or incorrect PSPro negative conversion. I see that GIMP can do some negative conversion also, haven't tried it on those negatives.
If there is a reasonably lightweight image processing program I might try it. Don't want to spend much (or any) money besides the film and processing until I decide it's something I really want to do. I have Darktable but didn't see an obvious way forward with it.
Alternatively I could pick up shooting slides again. It's been decades since I pulled out the slide projector but at least it's a way to use the slides themselves, and I can always scan them for digital viewing anyway. With print film I can't do anything with them except scan and convert. Well, I could print them but that's not a direction I want to go, don't even have a color printer. Unless a printed image is put on display, viewing it is an activity done by at most only a few people at a time. Viewing slides is a social occasion, and digital images can be shared and viewed on many different devices.
So I think I know the answer but I'd still like to try processing negatives. Any recommendations?
Thanks.
Dec 14, 2025 at 08:40 AM
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