Interesting project! I scan 35mm and medium-format film with a mirrorless camera, macro lens, and Lomography film holder, then convert with Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom. I’m happy with the results, but the Lightroom subscription has me considering writing my own converter.
Could you share more about your NumPy pipeline, or publish the code? I’m particularly curious about how you use the blank film reference and roll-level measurements to handle the orange mask, color balance, and tone curves. Do you use camera/scanner calibration profiles or film-stock-specific adjustments, or estimate everything from the scans themselves?
Also, your screenshot appears to show an OpticFilm 7400. Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about.
I don't have a public writeup, but the general approach for orange mask removal is: scan a blank unexposed frame from the same roll, take its per-channel mean as your reference white, then divide each pixel by that reference per channel before doing anything else. That normalizes the mask out instead of trying to subtract a fixed color. After that, a per-roll linear stretch (black point from the darkest scanned frame, white point from the lightest) gets you a rough base. Tone curve is the hard part: NLP uses a nonlinear S-curve tuned per stock, and matching that from scratch means a lot of trial and error with reference images you know the expected look of. If you want a quick win before rewriting things, Lightroom lets you write develop settings to XMP so you're not locked into the catalog even if you cancel later; the actual RAW/TIFF processing engine is what needs a subscription, not the metadata.
ravila4 · · focus · HN ↗
Could you share more about your NumPy pipeline, or publish the code? I’m particularly curious about how you use the blank film reference and roll-level measurements to handle the orange mask, color balance, and tone curves. Do you use camera/scanner calibration profiles or film-stock-specific adjustments, or estimate everything from the scans themselves?
Also, your screenshot appears to show an OpticFilm 7400. Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about.
mattz56 · · focus · HN ↗
ravila4 · · focus · HN ↗