Lomography

As you might know, scanning your films by yourself is always tricky and tedious. This method is aimed at high quality scanning but with little effort, it's not completely automated but it's very fast and lets you control framing. A good balance between precision and ease.

When I had my first LomoKino roll from the lab I thought that scanning 144 frames per roll may not be the funnest thing to do. So I tried to figure out a better method for myself and, who knows, for other fellow lomographers and LomoKino movie makers. As you might know, scanning your films by yourself is always tricky and tedious. This method is aimed at high quality scanning but with little effort, it’s not completely automated but it’s very fast and lets you control framing.

First off, the scanning. If you own a DigitaLIZA, good for you! Place your strip of film into the scanning holder and scan the entire strip. When you have all your strips scanned and saved into a folder you can process them (consistently) or proceed to the creation of the single movie frames.

This method is based upon a Photoshop script I wrote. That script must be run inside a Photoshop Action (there’s no need to be a Photoshop Actions master but some basic info will help you. Google around!) in order to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. You’ll find the script at the bottom of this page, place the script in your Photoshop Scripts folder. To locate your scripts folder have a look at your Photoshop documentation or ask google.

Steps:

• Then create an action named appropriately, I named mine Lomokino HD Crop.
• Assign a keyboard combo to run this action quickly, I chose SHIFT+F1.
• Press the Record button to start recording your action.
• In your actions palette click on the triangle with three horizontal lines at top right and select Insert Menu Item. A dialog will appear waiting for you to select an item from the Photoshop menus. Go to File > Scripts > Browse and select the script you just added.
• Press the Stop button.
• Now to use your new tool do the following:
• Choose the Square marquee tool and on the top bar select Fixed Ratio and 3:1 ratio. The lomokino in fact has a frame of 24mmx8.5mm approximately 3:1 aspect ratio. Select the first frame press SHIFT+F1 (or the keyboard shortcut you chose for your action). The script selected your image, resized it to have a width of 1920 pixels and saved with a numeric name (the time hours-minutes-seconds) so your frames are ordered.
• Move the selection frame down (use shift key to stay aligned) to the next frame and press SHIFT+F1 again. Do the steps for all your frames and all your strips.

Here is the script for Mac
Here is the script for Windows

Enter a new analogue dimension with the LomoKino. Lomography’s own 35mm analogue movie camera allows you to capture action and immortalize your story on film! Shoot 144 frames on any 35mm film and create your own cinematic masterpieces. Want to watch your movie the old-school way? We also offer the LomoKino and LomoKinoscope package!