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jeffk5545
Participant
Jan 27, 2012 4:42 AM UTC
Open for Voting

P: Ability to invert negative scans to positives (color and black-and-white)

I would dearly like to see the Lightroom 4 Beta team implement an additional feature in the final release. That feature would be the ability to take a camera+macro lens image of a B&W negative -- essentially a camera-based scan of a negative -- and invert the negative image to a positive image at the beginning of the development process in such a way that the resulting sliders in the LR4 Develop Module would not operate in reverse. As I understand it, this capability exists in Photoshop, but I don't own Photoshop. I do own Photoshop Elements 9, but that program only supports an 8-bit workflow, not 16-bits per channel, and round-tripping between LR & PSE9 requires the reimportation of a TIFF file that is more than twice the size of my NEF RAW files. Since this programming wizardry already exists in Photoshop, I would think that it would be a relatively simple matter to transfer and adapt that code for LR4 -- but then, I'm not a programmer, so what do I know...

I've been digitizing 40-year-old Kodachrome slides from my Peace Corps days in Africa, using a 55mm Micro-Nikkor (macro) lens, coupled to a Nikon ES-1 Slide Copy Attachment, and even on a D300s body, I can get truly excellent results. I can't wait to continue that work using the pending 36 megapixel Nikon D800 body with an upgraded f/2.8 macro lens (mine is the old 55mm f/3.5 design). I really, REALLY want to be able to camera-scan my many B&W negatives without having to generate huge intermediate TIFF files.

You can respond to this request by emailing me, Jeff Kennedy Thanks, in advance, for taking the time to review and consider my request. I LOVE Lightroom 3, and from what I've seen, I'm going to love LR4 even more. I REALLY appreciate the effort that Adobe takes to solicit input from the photographic user community.

BTW, if the feature I request *can't* be implemented right away, could the LR support team provide detailed, interim instructions as to how to use the "backwards" sliders, and in what sequence? That would be very much appreciated. I'm sure many older LR users have considerable analog image collections that they would like to digitize, and doing so in-camera is both 1) of surprisingly high quality, 2) MUCH faster than using flatbed scanners and 3) of much higher quality and resolution than flatbed scan and MUCH cheaper than professional drum scans.

    180 replies

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    Anonymous
    Oct 29, 2015 7:19 PM UTC


    Lightroom is useless because it doesn't handle B&W negatives of which I have over 5000. (it lacks the inversion facility to get a positive image)
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    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    Oct 29, 2015 7:05 PM UTC


    The requests for more precise point curves, possibly with a larger display as well as levels in other threads are is not so far fetched. I want to add another little function to it, that would prpbably be super easy to include (even in its late state as a public Beta): invert.

    Why all this? Take a look here: http://theagnosticprint.org/future-of...

    Considering all the tools and functions LR already has, it's just a small step short of being the #1 software for dealing with negatives. "Not much film shot these days" you say? True, but there are vast amounts of negatives out there waiting to be digitized. Read this article and you will understand. The scanning days (especially in the higher end segment) are cming to an end since the hardware starts dying down and replacement and sewrvice is not much lnger availavble.

    Still there is a huge legacy of negatives out there, some of it of incredible importance. Digitizing via DSLRs / MF camera backs seems to be the way to go. Ans LR has almost everything needed to be the tool for it. again - the article makes my point clear.
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    jeffk5545Author
    Participant
    Oct 29, 2015 7:04 PM UTC


    I don't own Photoshop, only Lightroom 4. I want to digitize hundreds of 40-year-old legacy B&W negatives, using a Nikon D4 or D800E, a macro lens and a Nikon ES-1 slide copy attachment. I want to maintain a 16-bit B&W RAW (NEF) workflow. No roundtripping a super-large TIFF file LR4 > PS > LR4. I want the equivalent of a Photoshop Filters > Adjustments > Invert option at the **beginning** of my RAW workflow, so that I can process a positive image, rather than a negative image, ideally with all the sliders working as if the starting image was a B&W positive image to begin with. Ideally, this could be implemented as a RAW image import preset. Let me know if this functionality can be added: Jeff Kennedy Thanks!
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    nfredrik
    Participant
    Oct 29, 2015 7:04 PM UTC


    It would be great with an "Invert"-button/command in Camera Raw, when working with reproducing negatives, (shot by camera instead of scanned) otherwise you have to do more of the correction/editing in Photoshop.
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    joep7405150
    Participant
    Oct 29, 2015 7:04 PM UTC


    I'd love to have an invert or negative check box in LR. This would be very helpful for working with scanned B&W film as DNG. While your at it if there was a color negative tool for inverting colors and removing color cast from scanned color negative film as DNG you'd make even more friends!
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    R Schuster 2
    Participating Frequently
    Oct 12, 2015 8:00 PM UTC
    Brilliant!
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    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    Oct 12, 2015 6:58 PM UTC
    Note that the develop sliders will now work as expected with respect to the positive image.
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    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    Oct 12, 2015 6:57 PM UTC
    Another way to speed the workflow, entirely within LR: Use a develop preset that inverts the tone curve. Then use an export preset that exports an image back into the catalog as a 16-bit TIFF, stacking it on top of the original.

    To invert a batch of photos, select all of them in the Library. Then from the Quick Develop menu, select the develop preset. Then right click the images and do Export > your export preset . The inverted images will be stacked on top of the originals.

    Perhaps not as convenient as having an option in Develop, but it gets the job done with just a few clicks.
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    R Schuster 2
    Participating Frequently
    Oct 12, 2015 5:42 PM UTC
    I've resigned myself to the fact that this will probably not happen, so I've been trying to figure out the best workflow around this problem. I thought I had it figured out by using the DNG Profile Editor app (free download from Adobe) to create a custom camera profile that had an inverted curve. It was easier to do than I expected, and at first seemed to work great -- I created a Lightroom preset with the new camera profile applied, and when imported into Lightroom with that preset applied, the images came in already inverted, and the tone curve looked normal, not flipped. Hurray! But I quickly learned there was a problem -- all the sliders still work backwards. Drat! My hopes of an easy solution were dashed, so I decided to create an automated 'droplet' app in Photoshop to simply invert images and re-save them (I'm working just with black & white negs at the moment, by the way). This is easier if using JPGs than raw files, and after some experimentation I decided that I don't need raw images anyway -- my JPGs are nearly indistinguishable from the raw files, and dslr-scanned negs have little dynamic range, so there's really no need for me to shoot raw. So now I can simply drag a whole folder of images onto my photoshop droplet, and all the images will be automatically inverted and re-saved, then I can import the already-inverted images into Lightroom. There's lots of info out there about batch-processing in Photoshop so I won't go into detail, but you just create an action, then File>Automate>Create Droplet.
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    Keith Reeder
    Keith Reeder
    Participating Frequently
    Oct 12, 2015 10:51 AM UTC
    Because there are hardly any posts supporting it.

    New features are a popularity contest, and this is clearly not a very popular request.
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