Yes, mainly negatives to positives. A few hints -- use an LED floodlight for a light source. Reasonably collumated, so it reduces flare at the edges a little, and you can try various color balance ones to reduce the fiddling when inverting.
Shoot in RAW and use Nikon conversion software to convert to TIFF -- you can adjust color balance, etc. Leave in TIFF flormat with extra space below and above actual image data if you are going into PS or similar, you want a raw file going in. You will have to find the correct exposure to get a good inverted image, what looks "good" as a negative can be terrible once inverted. Dark negatives make light positives and vice versa. Contrast can't really be controlled at this point other than to use a condenser light source rather than and LED flood to push it up a bit. Use a 90mm macro lens and a very rigid setup. Vivitar Series 1 from the 70s/80s would be perfect as they had a flatter field and better corner performance than Nikon or Pentax macros of similar focal length. The better the lens the better the results, obviously. I pull the raw TIFF file into Photoshop, invert, then use levels to "trim" the red, blue, and green channels down to the actual image values. Some channels look very "thin", but this works. Adjust the neutral point in each channel to correct colors. This should get you a very close color balance, although it will usually look flat. Go to "hue and saturation" in Adjustments and push up the saturation to suit -- I usually need a pretty good increase from movie film, standard negatives need less, but I find I need some most of the time. Then I adjust contrast/brightness, then color balance. If the negative was decent to start with this works pretty well. _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
