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Negatives to Positives

Nigel Bell

Hi

What do people use to convert a photograph of a film negative to a positive image?

I have found a couple of 3rd party apps (such as  Negative Lab Pro), but they only appear to work with Photoshop and/or Lightroom.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

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Comments

9 comments

Date Votes
  • Rick Sammartino Community moderator
    • Edited

    It kind of matters whether you're talking B/W or Color. B/W is easy, Color is more complicated.  I would start with the curves filter to see what that gets you. If it's a color neg, I imagine you'll still need to do some color correction.

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  • Nigel Bell

    Thanks for the reply. I will mainly be working with colour negatives. What I am really after is a plugin or something I can use to automate the process before I take the image into On1. Along the lines of Negative Lab Pro, which works with Lightroom.

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  • Alan Hill

    Yes I would love the similar work flow to Neg Lab pro and light room. I'm forced to use these at the moment 

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    Since Negative Lab Pro is a Lightroom plug-in you might be able to use it from within Photo RAW. Place a copy of the plug-in to PR's PhotoshopPlugins folder, relaunch PR and see what happens. You can get to the PhotoshopPlugins folder by opening PR's Preferences>Plug-ins tab and clicking the Open Default Folder button.

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  • Nigel Bell

    Thanks for the reply, Brian.

    I have tried this, but it isn't working for me (I may be doing something wrong). Negative Lab Pro comes as an installation file and installs many files under AppData. I had to make these unhidden and then copied all files into the PhotoRaw folder, as you detailed. Restarted and when I go to Filters I get the message "No filters found".

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    I doubt you did anything wrong. It's more likely that particular plug-in isn't compatible. It was a long shot but I thought it was worth a try. Sorry it didn't work for you.

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator
    • Edited

    What are you using to scan your negatives? VueScan will take care of converting from negative to positive for you. It has specific profiles for each type of film to account for the differences in the orange base they each use.

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  • Nigel Bell

    Thanks for the reply. I did borrow a scanner and was able to convert negative to positive. I haven't got the scanner now and would like to try photographing the negatives after having reasonable success with 35mm slides. So I am just experimenting and don't want to spend too much money.

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    Can you borrow it again? VueScan is pretty cheap at $25.

    https://www.hamrick.com/purchase-vuescan.html

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