converting negatives to positives

J
Posted By
jeroen
Jan 3, 2004
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313
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3
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Closed
Question,

I have a lot of negatives, i use my digital camera to take a photograph of these (in macro mode). When using the standard functionality of photoshop to invert them to positive i get a picture, but it is way too blue. Does anybody know of a plugin for photoshop that can convert negatives in a better way ?

Regards and thanks in advance,
Jeroen
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conversion negative

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MR
Mike Russell
Jan 3, 2004
jeroen wrote:
Question,

I have a lot of negatives, i use my digital camera to take a photograph of these (in macro mode). When using the standard functionality of photoshop to invert them to positive i get a picture, but it is way too blue. Does anybody know of a plugin for photoshop that can convert negatives in a better way ?

It can be done with curves in Photoshop. The idea is to make the orange mask black and the darkest possible part of the negative whtie.

Here are some sample curves, and a procedure for making your own: http://www.zocalo.net/~mgr/DigitalPhoto/derCurveMeister/ —

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net
H
hedge
Jan 3, 2004
I have a lot of negatives, i use my digital camera to take a photograph of these (in macro mode). When using the standard functionality of photoshop to invert them to positive i get a picture, but it is way too blue. Does anybody know of a plugin for photoshop that can convert negatives in a better way ?

Take a photograph of the negative, and also take a shot with a a bit of the internegative blank part (any clear orange bit, maybe some on the leader part you can shoot). Cut out the blank bit and resize it to the same size as your negative. Paste it into a 2nd layer above your negative shot , and invert it.. Then add the layers. That will cancel out exactly the orange layer no matter what make of film and individual variations in base material. Now you should have a ‘negative ‘ without the orange, so invert that and you should then only need to set levels or curves or whatever you use.
H
hedge
Jan 3, 2004
I have a lot of negatives, i use my digital camera to take a photograph of these (in macro mode). When using the standard functionality of photoshop to invert them to positive i get a picture, but it is way too blue. Does anybody know of a plugin for photoshop that can convert negatives in a better way ?
Another trick I have done was when I wanted to make contact sheets , ie positive copies of negs like as thumbnails, I placed them onto a flatbed scanner, scanned and saved the image ( of all in one go) , then I ran them through Vuescan (www.hamrick.com) treating the first pass as a negative to positive conversion, saving the result. A second pass as an ‘image’ was used to ‘set levels’, and a very commendable result was obtained. I see no reason why you can’t photograph the negs individually and save them in a numerical sequence (vuescan can handle that better ie 1, 2, 3, etc) Then run vuescan pointed at the folder where you saved them setting the file type to negative image and run them thru saving the result to a second folder. Run the second folder thru Vuescan with the image type set to image , and the other function set to ‘white level’ and you should have them all done. A little touching up in photoshop if required.

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