TDLR
I had been disappointed with the results I was getting from medium format film, particularly Rollei Infrared 400. The lab scans were small, heavily sharpened and lacked the tonality and fine detail I could see when examining the negatives on a lightbox.

So I started scanning selected 645 negatives at home using a Fujifilm GFX100S II, TTArtisan 100mm Macro, VALOI easy120 and Negative Lab Pro. The difference was far greater than I expected.

The comparison below is the same negative: the lab scan versus my home scan. For me, it completely changed what I thought Rollei Infrared 400 — and medium format film — was capable of.

Lab scan on left the home scan on the right

Home Scanning Medium Format Film – Finally Seeing What Was Actually on My Negatives

I have been experimenting with medium format film again, mainly shooting Rollei Infrared 400 through my Mamiya 645 Pro. If I am completely truthful, until recently I had been fairly disappointed with the results.

It wasn't the experience of shooting film that disappointed me. I enjoy that. The Mamiya slows me down, makes me think about the photograph and, with only 15 frames on a roll of 120 film, makes pressing the shutter feel rather more deliberate.

The disappointment came afterwards.

When I received my processed film and scans back from the lab, I looked at the files and wondered what all the fuss was about.

The scans were small, massively oversharpened and full of sharpening artefacts. Worse than that, they seemed to have very little of the tonality or fine detail that I expected from medium format film.

At times I genuinely wondered whether I had messed up the exposures.

This was particularly frustrating with Rollei Infrared 400 because infrared film already involves a certain amount of experimentation. Exposure isn't quite as predictable as conventional black-and-white film, especially when using an infrared filter. When a photograph came back looking poor, it was difficult to know where the problem was.

Was it my exposure?

Was it the film?

Was it the processing?

Or was it the scan?

Looking at the Actual Negative

The thing that made me question the scans was something remarkably simple.

I looked at the negatives.

Not on a computer screen. I put them on a lightbox and looked closely at them with a loupe.

There appeared to be considerably more information in those negatives than I was seeing in the files supplied by the lab.

That was the point when I started seriously thinking about scanning my own film.

I am reasonably happy with the lab scans I have received from 35mm film. I may experiment with scanning 35mm myself in the future, particularly as I already have the equipment to do it, but it wasn't really 35mm that pushed me towards home scanning.

It was 120 film.

If I am going to carry a Mamiya 645 Pro around, carefully meter a scene, load it with medium format film and go through the expense of having that film processed, I want to see what is actually on the negative.

The lab scans simply weren't giving me that.

I've now come to regard those basic lab scans as little more than rather expensive contact sheets. They are still useful. I can quickly see what I photographed and identify the frames that might be worth spending more time on.

But I wouldn't want to judge the quality of a medium format negative from them.

For that, I will still get out the lightbox and loupe.

Why I Chose Camera Scanning

There are obviously several ways of digitising film.

At the high end you can have negatives professionally drum scanned, and that can produce exceptional results. But having every frame professionally scanned to that standard quickly becomes very expensive.

There are also dedicated film scanners and flatbed scanners.

My problem is space.

I don't really have room for a large permanent scanning setup, and I didn't particularly want another sizeable piece of equipment sitting around when I already own an extremely capable digital camera.

So camera scanning seemed like the obvious solution.

The principle is incredibly simple.

Rather than putting the negative into a conventional scanner, you photograph it using a digital camera and macro lens with an even light source behind it.

The quality of the resulting scan is therefore largely determined by equipment I already own.

In my case that camera is a Fujifilm GFX100S II.

Before anyone rushes out and buys a GFX100S II for scanning film: don't.

That would be stupid.

It just happens to be my main digital camera. I already own it, it has a 102-megapixel medium format sensor, and therefore it makes sense for me to use it.

If you already have a good interchangeable-lens digital camera, I suspect the more important investments are a suitable macro lens, a decent film holder and a good, consistent light source.

Home scan of Aymer Cove, Mamiya 645 and Ilford HP5+

My Home Scanning Setup

The core of my setup is the VALOI easy120 scanning system.

I chose the easy120 partly because of its relatively compact size. I don't have the space for a permanent copy stand and large scanning arrangement, so I wanted something that I could set up when I needed it and then put away afterwards.

The kit cost me approximately £485 and includes the CineStill light source.

For the lens, I bought the TTArtisan 100mm f/2.8 2X Macro for Fujifilm GFX, which cost approximately £339.

I then use Negative Lab Pro for converting the negatives, which was approximately £99.

So ignoring the camera and computer that I already owned, my investment in home scanning was roughly £923.

That isn't cheap.

But neither are high-quality professional scans, particularly if you start looking at drum scanning selected medium format negatives. I also don't see this as equipment I will use for one roll of film. As long as I continue shooting film, I can continue scanning negatives with the same setup.

More importantly, I now have control over the process.

For me, that has turned out to be the biggest advantage.

Getting the Negative Flat

One issue I discovered fairly quickly with the VALOI system is film flatness.

My 120 negatives are returned from the lab cut into strips, usually containing four frames. Most of the time the VALOI holder works well, but I found that some negatives, particularly frames towards the end of a strip, didn't want to sit completely flat.

When you are trying to extract as much detail as possible from a medium format negative, that matters.

If part of the film curves away from the camera, you can have the centre perfectly focused while the edges aren't quite in the same plane.

I would actually like to see a more positive clamping system from VALOI at some point, perhaps something that sandwiches the negative more firmly.

For the moment, however, I have found a remarkably low-tech solution.

I put the negatives into an archival sleeve and place the sleeve inside a heavy book for a while before scanning.

It sounds slightly ridiculous considering the technology involved elsewhere in the process, but it seems to work.

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.

Focusing on the Grain

This is probably one of the most important things I discovered while setting everything up.

I don't focus on the photograph.

I focus on the film grain.

If I can see the grain sharply, I know I am resolving the negative rather than simply making the subject matter look reasonably sharp.

The problem is that doing this accurately on the rear screen of the GFX is difficult. Film grain is tiny and, even with magnification, I didn't find the camera screen the easiest way of judging critical focus.

My solution was Fuji's tethering software.

I connect the GFX to my computer and view the live image on my 27-inch monitor. I can then magnify the image and manually focus the TTArtisan until I can clearly see the grain structure of the negative.

That makes the process considerably easier.

The TTArtisan is a manual-focus lens anyway, which doesn't bother me in the slightest for this application. The camera and negative aren't moving. Once critical focus has been established, there is no reason to touch it.

This is one of those situations where tethering sounds like an unnecessary complication until you actually try it.

Trying to decide whether individual grains of film are critically sharp on the back of a camera is difficult.

Doing the same thing on a 27-inch monitor is considerably easier.

Exposure Settings

I keep the camera settings simple.

Everything is manual.

I use ISO 80 on the GFX100S II and shoot the TTArtisan at f/8. The shutter speed varies depending on the density of the particular negative.

There is no need for a fast shutter speed. Nothing is moving and the camera is fixed in position, so I simply adjust the exposure as necessary for each negative.

I'm not trying to make creative decisions in the camera at this stage.

The objective is to produce the cleanest, most detailed RAW reproduction of the negative that I can and leave myself as much information as possible for the conversion.

Converting With Negative Lab Pro

Once I have the RAW file, it goes into Lightroom Classic and I use Negative Lab Pro to perform the conversion.

For the Rollei Infrared 400 negatives I have been using Linear Gamma as my starting point.

I'm still experimenting.

That is worth emphasising because I don't want to present this as the definitive method of scanning Rollei Infrared 400 or medium format film. It isn't.

This is simply the workflow that is currently producing results I like.

One of the reasons I wanted to scan the negatives myself was to get away from somebody else's interpretation being permanently baked into a small JPEG or TIFF.

The lab scans I received had been sharpened so aggressively that the sharpening itself became part of the photograph. Grain was exaggerated, artefacts appeared and subtle detail was lost.

With my own RAW capture I can decide what happens next.

If I want sharpening, I can add it.

If I don't, I don't have to.

I can decide how much contrast I want. I can decide what happens to the highlights and shadows. Most importantly with infrared film, I can decide how I want that unusual tonal range to be rendered.

I have the negative and a high-quality digital reproduction of it.

The decisions are mine again.

The First Proper Scan Changed My Opinion

This was the real revelation.

Once I had the system aligned, the negative reasonably flat and the TTArtisan critically focused on the grain, I made my first proper scans.

Suddenly I could see what had been frustrating me.

There was detail in the negative.

There was tonality in the negative.

The Rollei Infrared 400 had a subtlety that simply hadn't been apparent in the lab files.

The lab scans had made the film look far coarser and less sophisticated than it actually was.

Looking at a properly scanned negative, I began to understand just how special Rollei Infrared 400 can be.

Of course it has grain. It is film, and I don't want to remove that character. But there is a huge difference between genuine film grain and digital sharpening artefacts masquerading as grain.

More importantly, there are tonal transitions and small details that make the larger negative worthwhile.

This was what I had expected from medium format.

It had been there all along.

I just hadn't been seeing it.

How Big Are the Files?

My current scans are producing files of roughly 75MB. With some additional adjustment to the setup and framing, I think I should be able to push that into the 80–90MB region.

But I'm not particularly interested in chasing numbers simply for the sake of having enormous files.

The purpose isn't to create the biggest possible TIFF.

It is to capture the useful information contained in the negative.

There will always be a point where increasing digital resolution simply gives you a larger representation of the film grain rather than revealing any additional photographic detail.

I'm much more interested in whether the scan contains enough genuine detail and tonal information to make a large, high-quality print.

That is going to be my next test.

I Don't Scan Every Frame

One thing that surprised me is how little time this actually needs to take.

I don't intend to meticulously home scan every frame from every roll.

That would turn something I enjoy into a chore.

Instead, the lab scans still have a purpose.

They give me a quick contact sheet.

I can look through the roll, then physically examine the interesting negatives on the lightbox with a loupe. From there I can decide which photographs deserve a proper scan.

These are the potential portfolio images.

Once the scanning setup is assembled, aligned and focused, capturing those selected negatives is actually very quick.

I much prefer that workflow.

Have the film processed. Get the basic scans. Look through them. Check promising negatives physically. Then spend my time properly scanning perhaps two or three photographs rather than obsessively digitising everything on the roll.

Not every photograph deserves 100 megapixels of attention.

Has Home Scanning Made Medium Format Worthwhile?

For me, yes.

And that has probably been the biggest surprise of this entire experiment.

Before doing this, I had been quite disappointed with my return to medium format film.

I liked using the Mamiya. I liked the slower process. I liked experimenting with Rollei Infrared 400.

But the final files weren't giving me what I expected.

Now they are.

More importantly, I have control over them.

I am no longer looking at a heavily sharpened, relatively small lab scan and wondering whether I got the exposure wrong or whether medium format film simply isn't as good as I remembered.

I can look at the negative myself.

I can scan it myself.

And I can make my own decisions about how that negative should become a finished photograph.

That has made the whole experiment fun again.

The Next Step: Printing

I haven't yet completed what I consider the final test.

Printing.

Looking at photographs at 100% on a computer monitor can become a fairly pointless exercise. Ultimately, I want photographs rather than enormous files.

My intention is to take some of my favourite Rollei Infrared 400 images and have them printed properly on fine-art paper.

That will tell me considerably more about the quality of the entire process than another evening spent pixel-peeping in Lightroom.

If the results are as good in print as I hope they will be, I may eventually make some of these infrared photographs available as fine-art prints through my online store.

That, for me, would complete the process.

A roll of infrared film loaded into a Mamiya 645 Pro, exposed out in the landscape, chemically developed, digitised at home and finally turned into a physical print.

There is obviously a digital stage in the middle, but I don't see that as somehow making the process less authentic.

It is simply my darkroom.

Home Scanning Hasn't Replaced the Lab

I should make one final point.

I'm not abandoning film labs.

I have neither the space nor, currently, the inclination to start developing all my own 120 film. I am perfectly happy to let somebody else deal with the chemistry.

I'll probably continue ordering basic scans as well because they are convenient.

I have simply changed what I expect those scans to be.

They are contact sheets.

Nothing more.

If there is a photograph I genuinely care about, I'll get the negative out, put it on the lightbox, look at it through a loupe and then scan it myself.

The combination of the VALOI easy120, TTArtisan 100mm macro, GFX100S II and Negative Lab Pro finally seems to be giving me what I wanted when I decided to experiment with medium format film again.

It isn't a cheap setup, although most of the expensive equipment was stuff I already owned. It isn't completely perfect either. Film flatness can be an issue, and there is definitely a little more experimenting I can do to squeeze the maximum quality from the system.

But I don't think that matters.

For the first time since returning to medium format, I feel as though I'm actually seeing what I photographed rather than somebody else's interpretation of it.

And perhaps most importantly, I'm finally seeing what Rollei Infrared 400 is capable of.

I had started this experiment wondering whether medium format film was going to live up to my expectations.

It turns out I may have been asking the wrong question.

The film wasn't necessarily the limitation.

The scan was.