2026-08-21

Scanning old film with a phone and a light pad

A box of family negatives, no scanner, and a weekend. The setup that worked: a cheap LED tracing pad, a cardboard mask cut to the frame size, and the phone on a stack of books so it stays parallel.

Lock focus and exposure on the first frame, shoot in RAW, and invert later in bulk. Dust shows more than scratches; a soft brush before every strip saved more time than any software step.

Two hundred frames took about three hours, most of it handling the strips.