HELMUT Film Scanner

Scan film using your phone! Digitize your negatives without buying any hardware.

HELMUT is the ultimate analog film scanner on your phone.

The app uses a unique algorithm to automatically color-correct your negatives. The built in manual controls allow adjusting levels, saturation, gamma, brightness/contrast & sharpness of the image.

The new version 2.0 was built from a scratch and features a new minimal UI and a much faster & sophisticated image processing technique.

The app can be used to digitize any type of color and black & white negative film. It does invertion & color-correction real time and can be employed as a quick contact-sheet tool.

Instructions

1. Place and press a negative uniformly on whatever you like (see section Lighting the Film below).

2. Choose the film size and type.

3. Tweak the scan using the in-app photo editing toolkit.

General Guidelines

* Make sure you light the film frame uniformly.

* Don't use flash or any color effects while capturing the frame with the camera.

* Leave out the film perforations when capturing. The colors will be more accurate then.

* Try eliminating other sources of light. Put your main light source (see next section) into a box with a single hole for a phone lens on top of it. This fixes the excessive contrast or color cast in the resulting scan.

Lighting the Film

No matter what you use, make sure it's lit uniformly.

Suggested light sources:

* Your laptop screen with an empty Notepad window (and turn on max brightness of the screen).

* iPad, Tab, any tablet with some lightbox app open. Or just plain white screen.

* Your window pointing to the sky.

* Google "DIY film lightbox".