Photographing Negatives
I thought I’d have a crack at writing a tutorial for photographing negatives, as I’ve just dicovered it to be far easier than I could have imagined!
I tried two methods, one without a lightbox, and one with a home made light box, both seem to work well, although the lightbox has a distinct advantage.
Without a lightbox
You need to find yourself a window with a good amount of sunlight coming through (easier said than done in England!)
Attach the negative to a sheet of plain A4 paper and fix this to the window, I used selotape and it left a little adhesive behind, masking tape should be fine though, blue tack is better still.
Set your camera up to take macro shots, or super-macro if you have the facility and get as close to the negative as your focus will allow and take your shot(s).
How To make a lightbox
Using a lightbox has the advantage of not needing a bright day, infact bright light may be more of a hinderance than a help!
As the name suggests, a lightbox is no more complicated than a light… in a box.
The box I used was a wine bottle box with a cheap external flash unit at the bottom connected to the camera’s sync output.
A sheet of A4 placed over this with the negative on top is perfect.
Set the camera to manual mode and turn on the external flash trigger, shutter as fast as possible and with as small an aperture as you can.
Processing
These instructions are for Photoshop, I’m certain that GIMP has a very similar tool though.
The photo you import should look like the one above.
The first thing to do is to invert the colours using cmd+i (ctrl+i for windows)
Next we need to adjust the colour balance, bring up the colour balance panel with cmd+b (ctrl+b)
For Mid-tones and shadows, the numbers you want are +45, -45, -45.
For highlights, I use 0, -45, -45
The end result should look like this
That’s really all there is to it!