Viewer to view negatives as positives.

[gary892]

I have several hundred color negatives that I need to go through.
I have a light table and a loupe.

I am wondering, is there a viewer that views negatives as positives?

Or is there some DIY way of creating a way to view negatives as positives?

I have a scanner but scanning several hundred negatives is not something I want to take on.


Thanks

Gary

[Michael W]

If you have an iPhone you can use the accessibility settings to invert colours. Then when you view through the camera app you will see the negatives as positives. If you have an Android phone you might be able to set that as a special effect in the camera settings.

[gary892]

Michael,
thank you for the response.
That is a very clever idea.
I have an Android phone and there is a setting for negative.
It is not perfect, but it's good enough for what I need.

Thanks

Gary

[bob carnie]

You could batch scan at very low rez which should be fast on any scanner..

[towolf]

Android 5.0 has an "Invert colors" option that applies to the whole operating system, any screen. This had been removed in earlier versions and came back

Unfortunately it’s not a true linear negative. It’s a "reverse video" mode, i.e., it inverts luma but not chroma, e.g., green stays green etc.

http://i.imgur.com/a1sjsz3l.jpg


And I noticed when using the tablet in my 4x5 enlarger, that they also apply a gamma curve, making prints very awkward.

http://i.imgur.com/zBDUTWUl.jpg (http://imgur.com/zBDUTWU)

The other option is the stock Gallery app from Android 4.x which has an editor that provides "Negative" and "Curves" filters. But doing that to an image is many more steps.

[Bruce Watson]

...is there some DIY way of creating a way to view negatives as positives?

You'll scoff and think I'm not serious, but... perhaps the best way to do this is to use your head. Literally. If you practice and actually try, you can learn to see them as positives. Similarly to how you can see the image on the GG as rightside up.

I thought it wasn't possible either, until I put some effort into it. After some practice I got relatively good at it. Good enough to decide which negatives were worth scanning and printing. I got good enough that I seldom scanned a negative that I didn't then print.

I'm not talking just light and dark here. I'm talking color too. But interestingly, for me, I never could get the orange mask to go away -- I could just see "through" it. Hard to explain, but it didn't get in my way.

[Liquid Artist]

Bruce is right, however when someone else looks a the negative and sees it for what it really is they tend to look at you as if your nuts.

[Adamphotoman]

A friend needed some prints from some odd size glass negatives from around 80 years. I used a large light box, a copy stand, a D800 with Macro lens and I simply shot raw files.
The results were quick and amazingly good.
To even out the illumination I made an LCC profile in Capture 1 pro. I output full res tiffs and inverted them in PS. An inverted colour head should also work.
The advantage is that one can name, images to the negs and archive everything at the same time for future use.

[Patrick13]

With B&W negs there is an old trick to hold the negative up against a black background and shine a glancing light across the emulsion side, which lights up the silver and otherwise shows the dark background through.

Wouldn't work at all with color, unfortunately.