NEWS: ‘Negative Supply’ for 120 hits Kickstarter & ‘FilmLab App’ Preview Version for Mac and Windows

10 February, 2020

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Negative Supply ‘Film Carrier 120’ Launches on Kickstarter

After thier successful previous campaign, Negative Supply has just launched their new ‘Film Carrier 120’ on Kickstarter. As you might gather by the name, this new film carrier takes the original concept for transporting and holding 35mm film flat for digitisation with a digital camera, and expands it to hold 120 film.

As I said in my previous news item about the 35mm version, as the person behind the – still yet to be finished (though now very close) – pixl-latr, I’m really interested in what Negative Supply is up to. pixl-latr is very much designed as an entry-level product when it comes to digitising film with a digital camera. The Negative Supply products as an alternative are much more high-end products.

The principle is similar though. Negative Supply film carriers aim to hold your negative flat, but where thier products differ from pixl-latr is that they provide a film transport mechanism. The benefit of this is, of course, speed. When I was chatting to AJ from Negative Supply the othe day, he told me that one of thier beta testers had managed to digitise an entire roll of 120 film using the new carrier in about 70 seconds!

Alongside this Kickstarter launch, Negative supply is also launching their “learning tools” – available here – this will be an ever-growing resource to help educate people in the best practises when it comes to digitisation with a digital camera. I’m all for this too – the more information like this online the better!

The guys from Negative Supply go on to add that:

This Kickstarter will not only fund the production of the Film Carrier 120, but also allow us to continue expanding our abilities as a small company. We aim to use this campaign as a jumping off point. With huge plans for 2020 and beyond, the strong success of this campaign will empower us to pursue many more exciting projects related to film digitization (and other film projects).

Exciting times in the world of film digitisation! I’m really pleased to see this product coming to market – its a sure sign that this area of our craft is growing, and I’m really excited to be a part of it!

The image at the top of the post is a prototype – this is a render showing the colour of the final product

Sample image from the 120 film carrier (crop on the right)

You can find the Kickstarter here

Develop and Fix announces public preview of FilmLab for Mac and Windows

In more exciting news in the world of digitisation with digital cameras, ‘Develop and Fix’, the company behind ‘FlimLab App‘ have announced a preview version of FilmLab™ for macOS and Windows operating systems.

FilmLab is software for colour converting digitized negatives to positives. To date, Film Lab App has been an app that’s confined solely to mobile phone use. The ever increasingly popular ap enables users to photograph – with the smartphone – a negative and have the software convert said negative to a positive image for sharing on social media etc.

The next logical step for Abe – the brains behind the app – was to create a platform that would work on macOS and Windows. The benefit of this is of course that much higher quality cameras can be used in the digital capture part of the process. The software will also accept RAW and DNG formats.

The apparent key difference between FilmLab App and other software is that the software has been designed to emulate the various steps within the darkroom.

The preview version is immediately available as a time-limited free trial and will be released for sale in early March. Abe is encouraging as many people as possible to download this pre-release preview version in the hope that users will be able to provide useful feedback. If that sounds like the sort of thing you would like to do, you can download here

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About The Author

By Hamish Gill

I started taking photos at the age of 9. Since then I've taken photos for a hobby, sold cameras for a living, and for a little more than decade I've been a professional photographer and, of course, weekly contributor to 35mmc.

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Comments

Terry B replied:

Comment posted: 13/02/2020

Huey, there are some important considerations to consider. Emphatically, the "best" lens will be a proper macro because these are designed to copy flat field subjects, which is what you will be doing here. Fortunately, your Fuji can shoot with adapted legacy lenses, so you won't need to spend a lot on the latest AF digital macro lenses. But let me illustrate why macro lenses are best suited to the job in hand. The first is their close focusing ability and which doesn't degrade the image. Why will close focusing be important? Well, to capture the full area of the negative/slide on the sensor, you need to know the image ratio a sensor is capable of. For example, it is easy to see that the sensor's size is the limiting factor. Shooting at 1:1, life size, a subject's dimensions will be the same as that recorded on the sensor, so when working at 1:1, a FF sensor can capture a larger subject than APS-C. So we know that with FF or APS-C, we need to capture at a smaller image ratio. But at what focus distance will this be? The image ratio is easy, it is simply the diameter of the film measured along the diagonal divided by the same measurement applied to the sensor. Using APS-C as the example, because this is what your Fuji has, in capturing a 6x9 film image the ratio is roughly 1:4. To answer my earlier question, why is close focusing important? is the focusing distance to achieve 1:4. With a 5cm lens this is around 250mm, or 10 inches. With a 100mm lens it will be 20 inches. How many lenses of this focal length, other than a macro, can focus as close? An alternative to the macro route is to use an enlarger lens and focusing bellows. Just like macro lenses they are designed for near field use but need the bellows unit to focus. A good enlarging lens should perform as well in this role as a macro. A standard lens on bellows is likely to perform poorly at such close distances as it just isn't computed for such close near field and will perform badly at the edges of the frame owing to curvature of field. The formula for calculating the focus distances for any image ratio is easy. It is the focal length of the lens x (1 M)/M, where M is the image ratio. So for an image ratio of 1:4 with a 50mm lens it is 50 x (1 .25)/.25 = 250mm, or roughly 10 inches. I hope this has helped.

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