
If you have a negative and wondering how you can convert it to soft copy, in this post I will share with you how you can achieve it with your smartphone.
A friend asked me to help him print out his negatives of over 20 years, and this service is virtually not available, because most photo studios have gone digital.
Although you can achieve this in so many ways. In this article, I’m going to use some basic items like a well-lighted sheet of paper or a laptop screen to achieve this.
THE SETUP
- White sheet of paper and sunlight
- A smartphone with a camera
- A photo-editing software
THE PROCESS
First of all capture the image in the negative with your smartphone by placing the negative on the lighting, get a good shot of it.
copy the image into your system for editing
Open the image in a photo editor, in my case, I am using Adobe Photoshop.
Crop out the area of the image I want to use and copy it.
Create a new file, paste it on the new canvas.
I will duplicate the image layer by pressing Ctrl+J and then work on the duplicated one.
Invert the image by pressing Ctrl+i,
Open the Curve dialog window by going to Image => Adjustments => Curves or you can use the short cut – Ctrl+M.
Adjust each color channel (Red, Blue, and Green). On each channel, move the dark handle to the starting point of the curve and the white one to the end of the curve.
With this, you will achieve a decent image quality of the negative.
So it is as simple as this. You can now take the soft copy to a photo studio for printing if you don’t have a photo printer.