FilmLab: Negative Film Scanner 4+

Does a decent job with black-and-white negatives. But it’s missing some major features, including the ability to select a bunch of scans and upload them at one time rather than individually.

Also, I don’t see why cannot have manually adjustable exposure.

Even better would be if it used the HDR feature on the camera to capture a wide dynamic range so negatives are a slightly under exposed and slightly overexposed all capture perfectly and separated out.
Add all these features and it’s worth $25.

Not sure why this app has poor reviews. I have tried the other negative scanning apps in the App Store and FilmLab works the best. It scans negatives with a clean and easy to use interface. It has just the right amount of tools and will save a Tiff file. It doesn’t have the intrusive magic filters or colorizing features that are always in your face. It’s a solid straightforward app.

So I saw a lot of one star reviews and I feel like I should say something. I downloaded on two different iPhones X and the iPhone S and the issue with the image flickering and giving weird colors is very annoying and it showed on both devices.

When you take the picture of the negative sometimes it will give you a weird exposure. However when I go to crop the picture every time I move the crop corners the pictures gets better and better. When you’re done cropping you will have a fully exposed picture that you can adjust all the basics necessary on the edit section.

Is the app the most high definition scan? No however I’m taking a picture of a picture with a phone, but it does the job much better than the other free ones I downloaded.

My set up was my iPad far enough to lose the pixels in a box and my phone on a tripod. I got really good results for Instagram isn’t all we want anyway right?

So I don’t think the one star review is indicative of the performance of the app. I did expect for 6 bucks the app to be on the efficient side and not have those basic issues especially because one of the selling points is “the app recognizes the negative and transforms into a positive.”

But all and all I’m a hobby film photographer and it does what I needed to do before moving on to pro things.