Workflow Overview

The picture of the Cadillac Eldorado in my last post was taken with a 35mm film camera in 1972 or thereabouts, and here it is in 2018 in digital form on the Internet. So how did that happen?

Within a few days of taking the picture I developed the roll of Panatomic-X and printed an 8×10 glossy contact sheet in my home darkroom. 

46 years later, I still have the negatives in NegaFile sleeves and the contact sheet in a ring binder. It took me 2 or 3 minutes to find the contact sheet and retrieve the strip of film with the picture I wanted.

I digitized the negative image as a RAW file using a Fuji X-T20 camera and 50mm Schneider Componon S lens with a Leitz BEOON copy stand on a Logan light box. (see above).

I converted the Fuji X-Trans RAW file to a DNG file using Iridient X-Transformer.

I opened the DNG file in Affinity Photo where I inverted the image, cropped and straightened it slightly, and adjusted the white and black levels. The scan was clean enough to need no digital spotting. Finally, I exported the image to my iMac desktop as a JPG.

I uploaded the JPG file from the iMac desktop to my Flickr camera roll and linked it from there to this blog post. A big thank you to Dan James at 35hunter for explaining how to link the Flickr file to the WordPress blog!