Inverting a color 35mm negative

[MickM]

I'm setting aside this winter to tackle converting all of my 35mm strip negatives into digital format. I purchased a neat macro lens adapter for a digital SLR camera so that I can quickly snap images of the negatives and process them all later. I recently purchased AP and was kind of shocked to discover that it can't (I think) natively do such an inversion. I see that it can do a basic binary inversion, but not a photographic negative conversion. I'm not big into photography, but a friend of mine who is assured me that the orange hue a negative has is in fact an industry standard (I think he said C41 or something like that). I totally get that many of these pictures will need subsequent tweaking for cropping, dust & scratch removal, color degradation etc. but I'm not really too much of a perfectionist and would have expected that (hopefully) most of these "C41" inversions would have been good enough for me. 

Is this capability buried somewhere under a different name - it would just strike me as mind-blowing if this wasn't in AP's arsenal. I'm just trying to get to first base... 
 

[thomaso]

I doubt that APhoto comes with a 1-click solution but there are various tutorials online…

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=affinity+convert+adjust+negative+film+to+positive

For instance, this thread offers two solutions (.aphoto / LUT) and two video tutorials:

[MickM]

Thanks - I guess I was naive to think this would be straightforward then :-/. Decades ago I recall going to the local supermarket to get my pictures back in an hour and there was a big machine that just took care of business. There was no meaningful additional IQ anywhere else in the vicinity, so everything about how good the pictures came out was done within the machine. I suppose that machine had access to the raw orange color between images as a correction starting point, but all the tweaking I see people performing in AP or Photoshop to yield a good picture must surely have also been automatically done by that now ancient machine. You'd think that would have been captured by now in our modern day software tools... 

I haven't started photographing all of my negatives yet, and I can certainly adjust my setup magnification so that I capture a small border of the negative's background to provide a target for the "orange correction". At that point I could imagine a magic tool for schmucks like me that does something pretty decent with the click of a mouse, and also has an eyedropper tool with which I can first sample that border (to refine the default orange) before using the magic tool. I still find it kind of amazing something like that doesn't exist. If it still looks not so great, my next step would be the enhance tool you see in so many apps, like Apple's Photos - I usually like what that does. I totally get that most people in this forum are photography diehards and want to tweak everything to get their pictures just right, but not me (and most other people I know either) - I was happy with what that supermarket machine belched out 🙂.

[PaulEC]

Every scanner I've used, that could scan colour negs, had automatic correction for the orange cast, although a bit of manual tweaking was still often needed! Also, I'm sure I did have some photo editing software, way back, that had a correction filter that you could adjust for different brands of film. It isn't rocket science, but I suspect that colour neg film is used so rarely nowadays that it isn't considered worth the effort of including a dedicated adjustment tool for it in APhoto.

[Ldina]

@MickM This is definitely NOT a 1-click approach, but I wrote this tutorial on processing color negatives using Affinity Photo. If interested, be sure to use the Rev B version later in the thread. This approach works very well for me with scanned color negative film.

 

[MickM]

Thanks for your responses - and also to the tutorial link (which I will read today). This is indeed a very helpful forum! The following is just to be provocative and NOT intended as offense! I'd like to mostly disagree with: 
    "This is definitely NOT a 1-click approach"
I keep coming back to my previous analogy about the dinosaur machine from the 90's that consumed my developed negatives and spat out pictures that I, and millions of others, cherished and stuck in our photo albums. I therefore conclude Ldina's statement is coming from the perspective of a photography aficionado who can readily see all the ghastly flaws from those mass-produced, consumer-targeted machines at all those 1-hour photo or mail order places. If those machines made something "good enough" for the rest of us then why isn't this more readily available? When I talk to my friends (we're all old farts) about digitizing my negatives they, ALL of them, respond by asking to let them know when I've got that figured out. They all would like to do the same thing but inherently believe it to be either way too expensive,  time consuming, or beyond their capabilities. It doesn't have to be this way. I previously owned Affinity Designer and bought Affinity Photo, effectively sight unseen, assuming such a basic photography capability couldn't possibly be absent. Sigh. I guess I could read up on the AP documentation, but is it at least conceivable that (assuming AP is scriptable) a consumer grade workflow to do this could be made within AP?

Finally, I suspect PaulEC is probably right about "it isn't considered worth the effort of including a dedicated adjustment tool for it in APhoto" - especially if fixing many of the long standing UI quirks in the Affinity suite apparently also falls into the same category...

[Ldina]

4 hours ago, MickM said:

The following is just to be provocative and NOT intended as offense! I'd like to mostly disagree with: 
    "This is definitely NOT a 1-click approach"

No offense taken at all. I should have been clearer. What I meant was, "My Tutorial Approach is definitely NOT a 1-click approach."

The tutorial approach will yield superior results, but I understand wanting a quick generic conversion. If that's good enough, I'm fine with that. Not all images deserve a lot of time or work.

I've attached a Macro, Neg to Positive (Auto-Destructive.afmacro), that is as close as I could get to a one click negative to positive conversion. To load the macro, in Affinity Photo, go to Window > Library, which will open your Library Panel (which is where macros are stored). Click the 'hamburger menu' in that panel and Import the Macro. Once that is done, you won't have to do it again.

To Run the Macro...

1. Open your Negative file in AP. If your negative was captured with a digital camera as a RAW file, it will open in the Develop Persona. Simply click Develop (don't apply any settings in the Develop Persona). This will deliver the file to Affinity Photo (as a "negative" image). If your original scan or camera capture was a TIFF, JPG, PNG, etc, it will open automatically into Affinity Photo.

2. BEFORE you run the macro, rotate and crop the image to remove all film borders, sprocket holes in the negative, etc. You want ONLY the image area showing. Visible sprocket holes will definitely mess up the conversion. To Crop, tap the "C" key and adjust the crop as needed. 

3. Open the Library panel (Window > Library in v2) and Click Once on the Neg to Positive (Auto-Destructive).afmacro. This will duplicate your original image onto a new pixel layer, Invert it, apply Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Auto WB to the image. 

4. It will also display a Contrast/Brightness Adjustment and allow you to tweak the settings, if needed or desired. (Note, you have to adjust the sliders first, then let go with your mouse to see changes take effect). Once you are happy with your Brightness/Contrast adjustment, click APPLY. 

5. If you want to save the original as an AfPhoto File, fine. If not, just Export to whatever format and size you want. Done. 

It's faster and easier than it sounds. Give it a try. If it gives you results that are good enough, great. If not, you can dive into the tutorial approach for those images that deserve the whole treatment. Hope this helps. 

 

Neg to Positive (Auto-Destructive).afmacro

[MickM]

Wow, thanks!! I'll give that a try when I get the chance in couple hours. As an aside, could your macro be improved if I was able to provide it with the color of the 35mm background instead of the default it presumably contains?

[Ldina]

2 hours ago, MickM said:

Wow, thanks!! I'll give that a try when I get the chance in couple hours. As an aside, could your macro be improved if I was able to provide it with the color of the 35mm background instead of the default it presumably contains?

You're welcome.

I'm not sure if the macro could be improved or not, based on a sample negative. Different negative films have different color masks, and even processing can affect that somewhat. Also, your original exposure affects the negative density and perhaps the color. I kept the macro super simple, (Invert, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto WB), since you were looking for fast, easy and uncomplicated. Those "auto actions" are generic and work based on what's in the underlying image, so the macro will work better on some images than it does on others. That's why I included the Brightness/Contrast Adjustment as a final step, to allow for some final tonal control before applying the macro. 

Try the macro first and see how it works. You can always add Adjustment layers to change hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc, if need be. The Tutorial has some guidelines for improving an image, but was ideally designed to work without using all those auto adjustments. 

If that doesn't work, upload a few negatives and I'll give it a look. No guarantees. 

 

[MickM]

Just tackling using your macro now, but AP doesn't recognize it. I'm on an M1 Mac running macOS 14.7.2.  

Edited January 5 by MickM
added error dialog box

[Ldina]

10 minutes ago, MickM said:

Just tackling using your macro now, but AP doesn't recognize it. I'm on an M1 Mac running macOS 14.7.2.  

I'm using an M4 running macOS 15.2.

You don't OPEN the macro as you would a normal file for editing. You have to install it first, as described below.

1. Open Affinity Photo. (don't open any file yet)
2. Window > Library (opens the Library Panel)
3. Click the Hamburger Menu in the Library Panel and choose Import Macro.
4. Once imported and saved into the Library, you can then proceed.

NOW, open your negative file into Affinity Photo. With the Library Panel open, single click on the macro to run it. 

[MickM]

Sorry - I can't make your instructions work. I'm sure I'm doing the right things, it's just that the AP dialog box for opening the macro shows the file grayed out  i.e. it doesn't recognize it as a valid thing to import :-(.

This may sound silly, but could you try deleting your macro, downloading the one from your post and importing that...

[Ldina]

30 minutes ago, MickM said:

This may sound silly, but could you try deleting your macro, downloading the one from your post and importing that...

Mick, you are correct. It did NOT load and was grayed out. My apology.

This ought to work, though. 

1. Window > Macro
2. Click the Import Icon and select the macro I created
3. Then click the Add to Library Icon (which will save it to the "Library")

BTW, I am running Photo v2.5.7. If the above doesn't work, make sure you are running the same version of the software, not an earlier release. 

[MickM]

Yay - that worked. I just tried it out and it did it's thing. I've only really taken one trial snapshot of a negative and the colors didn't come out great after the macro - but the shot of my negative was a bit out of focus and in all likelihood poorly shot. Up till now I've just been trying to see if I had all the puzzle pieces in place before moving forward in earnest.

I suspect I'll end up with a couple more questions regarding your macro and that maybe hijacking this forum with those questions isn't the best way to go about this. Would you mind if I transferred to messaging from here on?

[Ldina]

5 minutes ago, MickM said:

I suspect I'll end up with a couple more questions regarding your macro and that maybe hijacking this forum with those questions isn't the best way to go about this. Would you mind if I transferred to messaging from here on?

I'm glad that worked to load the macro. 

You won't be hijacking the forum if you continue to post to this thread. Others may learn something in the process and others with similar questions may be able to search and refer to it in the future. But, if you prefer, you can send me private messages via this forum (click on the "envelope" in the upper right corner to send a private message). 

My tutorial (Rev B) includes suggestions on photographing color negatives with a digital camera, which you may find helpful. I set up my camera, tripod, backlight, etc, and shot one negative after the other in fairly quick succession. I focused on each negative manually, using 10X Live View on my camera LCD for sharp focus. 

I kept the supplied macro very basic because you were looking for a quick, no fuss, one-click conversion. I can make the macro add additional layers for HSL, Vibrance, WB, Sharpening, Levels, etc, but they add complexity, which you said you wanted to avoid. Levels provides more control than a simple Brightness/Contrast adjustment. Curves, even more control, at the cost of added complexity. If you want those added, let me know. You can leave them "unused" if you don't need them, but they can be added to the layer stack for quick accessibility.