Whether you are a film photography enthusiast, or a person who have a collection of negatives that you will like to turn into digital copies, FilmLab app is going to be an orgasmic news for you. FilmLab is an up and coming app, developed by software engineer Abe Fettig, that turns slides and negatives into digital files simply by pointing and shooting at the negatives or slides. That’s all there is to it and it also why it is so freaking brilliant. With FilmLab, you can forget about film scanner, or whatever that you use these days – all you need is an iPhone or an Android Phone, the app and you’re good to go. Ok, maybe not. You will need a lighted box to make the negatives pop.
As you can see from the video below, the mere act of pointing the smartphone’s camera over the negative result in color images. From there, you can just pick the image you want, focus it if necessary, and hit the on-screen shutter button, and you are done. Another awesome thing is, it don’t just spit image it captures like camera do; the app captures several RAW images and combines them into a single image which you can then choose to save, or share it on social media of your choice. As for the quality of the digitized images… they sure do look pretty darn brilliant to us.
Now that the hassle of digitizing images captured with an analog film camera is out of the way, perhaps, more people will be more into this form of photography. I am not going to lie, I am totally sold. I have a whole bunch of negatives from long time ago and even some that were transferred to slides, and so it is not hard to see why I am totally sold by idea. I mean, seriously, virtually no other equipment needed? I’d say shut up and take my money! But there’s a catch here. Abe needs your help to finish the development. The app is now in its prototype stage and as you will see in the video after the break, it is nothing sort of a miracle negatives-to-digital conversion.
That said, the man has taken to Kickstarter to seek help and this is also where things get a little tricky. Unlike physical products, you can’t pay now and download it free off Apple Appstore or Google Play Store later. Current app stores do not have such provision. So, what’s going to happen is, you can show your support by dropping 3 bucks and in the return, you will get ongoing updates of the development. Or you could drop a little more, at $18, to access to the first Beta builds way before the app goes public and in addition, you will also receive free beta updates with previews of new features for up to a year (after the campaign ends).
Image: FilmLab/Abe Fettig.
Kickstarter via PetaPixel.
