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HELMUT Film Scanner logo

HELMUT Film Scanner for Android

By codeunited.dk Free Editors' Rating

Editors' Review

Download.com Staff Dec 16, 2013

HELMUT Film Scanner can make your photos look like awesome digital negatives in just a few seconds. If you're really savvy when it comes to photo editing, you can even tweak the app's edits to create something truly your own. It's quite a fun app if you're a fan of black and white photography.

This app turns your photos into a digital black-and-white or color negative after a quick scan. You can take a picture specifically for the app, or use any picture already on your smartphone or tablet. While the app's layout is basic, it's completely ad-free, which is a nice touch. Once HELMUT Film Scanner has processed your photo, you can change the look by adding more or less color, upping or dialing back the brightness, and more. You can share your finished photo on Dropbox, Flickr, and other sharing sites, automatically, or share it to social networks with just a touch. The app's controls take a little while to get used to, but feel incredibly intuitive and responsive once you understand them.

Though the app only does one style of photo editing, it does it so well. HELMUT Film Scanner is one of the easiest, most effective ways to turn photos into negatives. It does an amazing job of creating artistic shots that you'll really enjoy showing off.

Full Specifications

What's new in version 2.3

Added support for picking a negative/positive scan from the Gallery.

General

Release November 12, 2018
Date Added November 12, 2018
Version 2.3

Operating Systems

Operating Systems Android
Additional Requirements None

Popularity

Total Downloads 1,850
Downloads Last Week 3
Report Software

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Developer's Description

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".

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