A Simple Film Workflow (for disposable cameras)

I don’t claim to be an editing expert, however a lot of what you can do to a photo depends on the file you start with. Shoppers Drug Mart are the cheapest around – they’ll scan a roll to digital files for $2.99. What you get are 1544x1024 files good enough for the web. If you’re serious about printing them or need files with more bit-depth, uncompressed, etc I’d take them to Toronto Image Works where you can get gigantic files from your negatives.

I’ve been applying the same ‘capture sharpening’ principle everyone does when they start with their digital RAW files. Fixing colour casts can be done through Auto Colour which gets it in the ballpark and using Photo Filter afterwards to make a more precise correction if there’s still issues. People generally recommend to blur noise instead of trying to remove it which inevitably blurs detail; one of the better methods is to Despeckle the blue channel where noise prominently lies. There’s a slightly deeper method involving changing to LAB colour space, however I don’t believe it’s worth the destructive process of changing spaces when dealing with 8-bit files.

1. Despeckle the Blue channel
2. Spot Heal any obvious dust spots
3. Try Auto Colour to see how close it will fix colour casts and follow with Photo Filter if you can still detect a problem
4. Use Unsharp Mask (designed for film) and read this page. You just want to apply enough sharpen effect to lift the initial softness of the photo
5. Downsize to something like 800 or 1024 pixels on the long side. Small so they are useless in print, plus I feel the small size retains that mystery of what the viewer saw without needing to inspect every pixel
6. Use Smart Sharpen and Gaussian Blur option with a much lower amount percentage and radius. Gaussian Blur is used for soft or slightly out-of-focus photos (like the disposables)

    

 

I wouldn’t go overboard on tonal corrections with these files. The major eyesores are in the shadows. An easy way to fix them is by plotting points of interest using curves and moving the anchors with your arrow keys as to not make such drastic changes. Still…the photos need more work which has more to do with the limitations of the camera used. Some time in the immediate future I’m planning on getting an Olympus Trip 35, that way I shouldn’t have to deal with vignetting (as much) and obvious optical distortions or blurriness.