DOCK: First light
Hi, my name is Edu Alonso, I'm a designer and co-founder of Lento, and this is the first post on our blog.
Starting a company from scratch is proving even harder than I expected. I'd love to document every step calmly, but—as you might guess—time doesn't make it easy. Still, here I am. Let's get to the point: I want to talk to you about Dock & Lyra.
In 2012 I shot my first roll of film, at least consciously. I'm not counting the disposable cameras my mom used to buy me for school trips. As a digital native, I have to admit it was hard to understand. The photos didn’t come out as I expected, and the process was... slow. But I kept going. I kept shooting. A lot.
Since 2015, I’ve been working as a fashion photographer so yes, I’ve taken many photos.
(www.eduestalo.com)
Over time, I began to truly understand analog photography. And I say "understand" because I realized there's much more to it than just shooting, sending the roll to the lab, and getting a WeTransfer. That’s one part of the process, and a valid one, but the full experience goes way deeper.
That’s where Dock & Lyra was born. It’s a modular film scanner we're building, designed to make the transition from physical to digital smoother. Because, let’s be honest: unless you’re printing on darkroom and even then, you’ll probably need to digitize your images. And that’s where scanners come in.
A scanner, in the end, is not so different from a digital camera. What changes is how it's implemented. And that’s why scanning with a digital camera has become so common. It works, but it lacks the extra layer of implementation needed to get results closer to a true high-quality scan.
I'm not here to tell anyone how to work. I'm also not going to pretend I love the scanners available today. But as a photographer, I felt I needed something better. Not because scanners are bad, slow, or tedious (and I don’t exactly miss Windows 95). They just don't fit the way I like to work.
So as a photographer and designer, I wanted to create a tool that fits how I actually want to scan—and gives each person the freedom to adapt it to their workflow.
Dock was born as the carrier and light source. And just a week ago, I thought it was ready to launch. But no. I realized I wanted more. When you're designing a product, it’s easy to forget you're also the target user. And I wanted to launch something that, if I saw it as a customer, would make me say: "hell yes."
So I started almost from scratch. Why?
Because of the light.
At first, we developed a high-quality LED panel (+96 CRI), with intensity and temperature control, high output and good uniformity. It worked well. But I felt there was a better way.
What was it?
RGB narrowband light.
As a designer, because I can. As a photographer, because I care about color. It bothers me to see strange hues when I invert a negative.
The idea behind RGB narrowband is simple: we use LEDs that emit in three specific wavelengths—460 nm for blue, 525 nm for green, and between 630–660 nm for red—aligned with the sensitivity of each dye layer in the film (yellow, magenta, and cyan). This way, we light each one more selectively, avoiding color contamination between channels. It gives us a more balanced image, with fewer color casts—especially in whites and neutrals, which often get weird when inverting film.
When scanning a color negative, the orange mask—originally designed to compensate for spectral gaps in the dyes during optical printing—becomes a challenge. It introduces a strong blue-cyan cast once inverted, which you can only truly neutralize if your light source has a well-defined spectrum. Generic white LEDs—even high CRI ones—aren't made to shine through that mask, and tend to introduce imbalances from the start. Add a Bayer filter sensor into the mix, where data from neighboring pixels overlaps, and it becomes even harder to get clean color. So when you invert the image, you get cold tones where they don't belong. It's not a software issue. It's a data problem.
The ideal setup would be a monochrome camera, no Bayer filter. Light one color at a time, take three shots, and merge them into a full RGB image. Total control. But it's expensive and not practical if you're using your regular camera.
Second option: a Bayer sensor camera capturing each color separately. Better than white light, but still has some cross-channel contamination (crosstalk), because the color filters let some of the other wavelengths through. It’s a big step up from white light, but honestly, it’s slow and clunky.
Third option: we stick with a Bayer sensor, but do a single exposure using sequential RGB flashes. Then, we re-balance the intensity of each channel directly from the light source. The result is fast, consistent, and saves a ton of time later. Sure, we lose a bit of extreme flexibility in post. But for 99% of situations, it’s more than enough. And it beats the hell out of white light.
That’s what we’re aiming for: balance. A tool that fits real workflows, respects film color, and lets you scan without wasting time or losing quality.
If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to write me at hello@lento.fun
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