02-10-2022, 05:51 AM
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.
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.