If you’re using a flatbed scanner with a film adapter, make sure the glass is clean. Don’t apply water or whatever cleaning chemicals you have around the house to remove stains or fingerprints use a product specifically made for film cleaning such as PEC-12. Start by using compressed air or swipe lightly with a very clean cloth. Film scratches easily, so clean it gently and carefully. Removing dust or dirt from film before you scan will save you hours of retouching time later. Don’t be too concerned if images look unfinished during the scanning steps. Keep in mind that the goal here is not to produce finished files straight out of the scanner, but instead to scan the images in a less-processed form that makes it easy for you to work quickly in Lightroom or Camera Raw. Once the images are in good shape on your computer, you can identify images of high value (such as those you want to use commercially or enlarge for gallery display), and process just those more carefully in Photoshop using advanced but more time-consuming methods than the ones I cover here. That’s why this workflow aims to minimize the time you spend working in your scanning software or in Photoshop, instead doing as much as makes sense in Lightroom and Camera Raw. You can usually work faster by using the tools in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw that are designed to process whole shoots in bulk. Large scanning projects can be slow going because scanning software can be awkward to work with, and it takes a lot of time to hand-correct hundreds of scans individually in Photoshop. What you’ve learned editing digital camera images in these applications will help you with film scans too.įigure 1: You can quickly convert the film negatives on the left into digital image assets on the right, with the help of Lightroom or Camera Raw.

This article assumes that you have some experience using Lightroom 4 or Adobe Camera Raw 7. Their streamlined workflows and ability to edit TIFF and JPEG files can accelerate the process of importing, editing, and organizing incoming scans.

Instead of opening hundreds of individual scans in Photoshop, things will go much faster if you use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw with Adobe Bridge. Digitizing an archive of film images can be a time-consuming process.

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