Posted: 8/19/2007 12:13:46 PM EDT
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Apparently no one is home in the photo forum so I'll ask here: I found some old negatives and wondered if I scan them onto my computer, is there a way to 'develop' them on the PC? |
Any scanner capable of accepting strip negatives will produce a positive image...and is typically done by the software application that came with the device. Like any system/software that manipulates digital image data to produce a different result, your results are predicated on the quality of the algorithm doing the conversion. You will have options to tweak the output such as: contrast, sharpness, saturation etc. Typically the software that comes with scanners doesn't do the best job in this department. There are other scanners that use colored leds (Red Green and Blue) and actually scan the image in directly as a positive. You can control the individual color output of each lamp via a preview. These are more expensive and an example is the Nikon LS2000...this unit will set you back nearly 2000 dollars. If you take your negatives to a film processing center this is the type of technology you are going to get. If you have lots of negatives to scan, and quality is more important than money...a tri-lamp RGB scanner is the way to go. When I scan, I do so at the highest resolution and use the default output color/contrast values. Once the image is on disk, I use Adobe PS to make any adjustments and save a copy of the original scan and modified one. That way I always have an original scan to go back to incase I screw up the one I am modifying. |
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Getting good scans is the hard part. You need either a dedicated slide/negative scanner or some method of shining light through the film during the scan without confusing the scanner. Also remember that the negatives are tiny and they need to be scanned at a pretty high dpi if you plan on getting full size prints. Once they're inside the computer, tweaking the colors is easy with Photoshop. Even your scanner software can probably handle simple negative>positive conversion if you don't want to mess with Photoshop. Good luck.  Tri-X and Diafine FTW |