CS-LITE+ SpectraCOLOR™ Light Source

For Digital Camera Scanning Negatives & Positives

From CineStill

Camera scanning is the process of digitizing your film in a holder, using a stabilized camera with a macro lens and a light source. This simple setup allows you to create a digital RAW file from your film, which can then be converted into a usable digital image using specialty film conversion software. 

Professional lab scanners, like Noritsu scanners and Fuji Frontiers, are essentially the same concept as camera scanning – light passing through a piece of film to a digital sensor. But instead of using consumer digital cameras and broad-spectrum light sources made for capturing reality, lab scanners have light sources and digital sensors that were purpose made for capturing film, while incorporating the most advanced technology of that time with proprietary image processing. 

Other dedicated film scanning machines, like Imacon and Coolscan, alongside flatbed scanners for home users, have also been around for decades, but the workflow has gone relatively unchanged in that time. If anything, using the older hardware has only become more tedious as aging components and long-obsolete software become hurdles that are harder to overcome with each passing year. Scanning film quickly became time consuming, expensive, finicky, and difficult to do right... until now. 

In the early days of camera scanning, just having a consistent even light source was a big leap forward. But as digital sensors and raw processing improved — far outpacing the aging components and software of traditional film scanners — it became clear that something deeper was still missing: true color fidelity. That’s where SpectraCOLOR™ comes in, taking the guess-work out of what a negative conversion should look like. 

After more than 3 years in development, SpectraCOLOR™ is the next big step in closing the gap between analog beauty and digital precision. Giving you not just a “close-enough” reinterpretation, but the most accurate representation of your film to work with. This goes beyond saving time in post processing, yielding gorgeous results deserving of the medium itself. Because, why would you go through all the effort of shooting on film to end up with a sub-par scan that misrepresents your vision and the true nature of the film stock you committed to shooting? Using SpectraCOLOR™-enhanced film conversion tools will ensure that you get what your film was designed for, and enjoy a simpler conversion experience.

This proprietary technology has been designed to precisely match the unique spectral dye-density curves of color negative print films to the RAW digital photography workflow, making scanning your film simpler, while preserving film’s natural colors and beauty. After all, printing in the darkroom never required rendering, analyzing, and reinterpreting perfectly processed negatives; just density and color correction. SpectraCOLOR™ makes your digital camera see your negative the way that it was designed to be read by RA-4 paper.

Film, particularly C-41 processed color negative film, was originally designed to be printed onto RA-4 paper in the darkroom — where the nuances of color balance and density were managed through analog trichromatic color science. When digitizing negatives through a broad-spectrum Bayer filter however, we’re translating that limitless analog color space into a subtractive-color based digital system that interprets color very differently than the paper that print film was designed for. This often results in unnatural hues, skewed tones, and muddy color reproduction — despite the quality of the sensor or the CRI of the light source.

With our unique experience with the analog color science of film and photochemistry—and an innovative yet practical comprehension of film—we realized that in order to really honor the rich color and dynamic range of film, we needed more than just brighter light, we needed better light and a better way to process it. Light that was tailored not only to the base density color of film like the CS-LITE but calibrated to the complex way that color film and digital sensors both respond to the color spectrum.

CineStill is addressing this in a new way no off-the-shelf LED's or raw processing software could. Our goal to advance the color science and accessibility of at home camera scanning began with the CS-LITE “color modes” and was further refined by the CS-LiteBrite+ and the included Color Negative Calibration Sheet. Meanwhile, SpectraCOLOR™ was being perfected through both digital and analog media, to bridge the gap between the analog spectrum and hybrid color spaces.

SpectraCOLOR™ is an innovative new light technology developed by CineStill to make scanning your film simpler with better results right out of the camera. Unlike conventional white light methods, which make film look flat or muddy, SpectraCOLOR™ enhances the color spectrum of the light source to match the unique properties of color film, ensuring your scans reflect the film's vibrant natural beauty. Through years of research and experimentation, utilizing advanced color science and nano-technology, SpectraCOLOR™ has been designed to produce an ultra-wide color space, precisely matching the color layers of film to the separate color channels of digital capture, finally making true-to-film scans a reality.

Other generic high-CRI light sources produce color cross-talk, which results in poor contrast, reduced saturation, and color casts in the image. Paired with tools like our CS Negative+ Conversion Tools, the CS-LITE+ with SpectraCOLOR™ is an advanced light source that optimizes color fidelity, tonal separation, and bit-depth of the raw file; giving you quicker, purer, and more consistent results that reveal the true beauty of film as intended.

While SpectraCOLOR™ may be fundamentally recognized for it’s hardware innovation, that will optimize any conversion workflow, it’s also part of a larger vision. The release of our CS Negative+ Convert Tools gives photographers a first glimpse of what this technology can do. Designed to work with the Adobe CC suite, these simple tools plug right into the presets panel with all current versions of Lightroom (including Lr Mobile for free) as well as Photoshop and Bridge with Adobe Camera Raw.

These software tools will already work with your existing camera scanning setup and can give your film negatives more true-to-film color conversions after capture, especially when paired with the CS-Lite+, which includes the new CS-LiteBrite+ and the included Color Negative Calibration Sheet. Together, these tools allow for an easier, faster, and more enjoyable conversion process — while still giving you all the additional control you need in this post-digital era to make your work your own.

Why go through all the effort of shooting on film only to end up with a scan that misrepresents the film itself? SpectraCOLOR™ ensures that the conversion of your negative is the best it can be — true to the colors you captured and the rendering of the film you chose to shoot. SpectraCOLOR™ is more than just a breakthrough in light quality — it’s a foundation for the future of film conversion.

And that future is already taking shape.

At CineStill, we’ve been building on what we introduced with our first light source, the affordable CS-LITE — rethinking what a film scanning light source could be if it was purpose-built to take full advantage of this new technology. Not just brighter, but smarter. Designed to deliver the most accurate, true-to-film color possible straight from your digital capture.

SpectraCOLOR™ offers precise color separation and rendering, resulting in a high-fidelity digital representation of your film negative — right out of the camera, and negative conversion that compliments the process that print film was designed for — printing. This dramatically reduces the need for post-processing and preserves the soul of your analog capture.