Turn photo negative to positive image.

[RealGomer]

I've been cleaning out my deceased mother's things and I found some old film negatives. How old? They were taken with a Kodak Brownie camera and the negatives are 2.5" x 3.75", one per picture. It is black & white film. Is there software that will capture these negatives so I can "print" the pictures digitally to share with my brothers? I already have a Canon CanoScan flat bed scanner and GIMP 2.10.30. BTW - Canoscan treats the negative as a negative strip and doesn't capture part of the image. Loverly.

Thank you.

[Ofnuts]

Home scanners only do 24x36 negatives.

If you want to digitize the negative, the best solution is to take a photo of it with some back light. In the previous century this was complicated (had to find a back light of decent intensity and color temperature that doesn't burn the negative, so that was mostly taping the thing to a window on a cloudy day). But these says you just put the negative flat on a LED display (phone/tablet/laptop/monitor) on which you display a white area (you can insert a sheet of printer/paper as a dimmer/diffuser).

Ideally you do all this with a camera on a tripod (there are also cheap fixtures to transform a phone into some sort of scanner)(*), but if you do this hand-held you can use Gimp's perspective tool to compensate the shooting angle.

Once you have a negative you apply a reverse curve with Curves (ie, make a curves that goes from top left to bottom right) (using Color > Invert would be a first approximation but isn't too likely to be ideal). You can save the Curves setting to apply to further negatives.

(*) If you do this with a camera+tripod there is a trick with a mirror to ensure that the camera axis is perpendicular and centered.

[rich2005]

There is a recent GEGL filter Tools -> GEGL Operation -> Negative Darkroom with some settings for these negatives. (had to trawl for this example)

   

The problem is getting decent back lighting, I have some success taping to window with a-sort-of-diffuser backing. Must try ofnuts tip about using a phone display for lighting.

[psau]

I would like to add some information that could help you:

• I purchased a small Light Box (5”x4” for Negatives, Slides & Films) with a color temperature of 5000 K ± 270K;
  
• I viewed many YouTube videos, but these 2 helped me a lot: Digitizing Your Film [with a DSLR]-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4f7d0-psIc and Scan 35mm or 120 negatives without a scanner-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2iC76S10Jo;
  
• I have seen & read this in many places: always place the image matte side UP When you process the image, flip it to correct this;
  
• I had some negative & slide holders laying around. I find this very helpful.
  

[programmer_ceds]

(02-10-2022, 01:03 AM)RealGomer Wrote: I've been cleaning out my deceased mother's things and I found some old film negatives. How old? They were taken with a Kodak Brownie camera and the negatives are 2.5" x 3.75", one per picture. It is black & white film. Is there software that will capture these negatives so I can "print" the pictures digitally to share with my brothers? I already have a Canon CanoScan flat bed scanner and GIMP 2.10.30. BTW - Canoscan treats the negative as a negative strip and doesn't capture part of the image. Loverly.

Thank you.

My Canoscan 8400F came with three transparency adapters - one will take strips of film with a visible area width of approx 2.25" and a maximum length of approx 8.5". If you have this with your scanner I would use it with the Canon supplied Canoscan Toolbox to scan the negatives and then save them to (lossless) TIFF files that you can import into GIMP to process (crop to size, convert to a positive, remove scratches etc). Personally I would have CanoScan Toolbox just save the captured image without attempting to convert it to a positive - you can then try different methods in GIMP to see which works best for you. Also scan at the highest resolution - you can reduce the size in pixels later if you wish or reduce the file size by converting to jpg but once information has been discarded in these ways you can't get it back (keep the original scan file)