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jeffk5545
Participant
January 27, 2012
Open for Voting

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

  • January 27, 2012
  • 167 replies
  • 8261 views

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.

    167 replies

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    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    October 12, 2015
    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.
    R
    R Schuster 2
    Participating Frequently
    October 12, 2015
    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.
    Keith Reeder
    Keith Reeder
    Participating Frequently
    October 12, 2015
    Because there are hardly any posts supporting it.

    New features are a popularity contest, and this is clearly not a very popular request.
    Keith Reeder
    Keith Reeder
    Participating Frequently
    October 12, 2015
    "Come on Adobe, there's literally no reason to not implement this feature"

    Yes there is - most people don't want or need this.
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    October 9, 2015
    I and a lot of my fellow photography friends are desperate for an invert button that doesn't destroy the rest of the adjustment sliders ....sigh :(

    Cheers
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    September 19, 2015
    I too vote for an invert button. However, this thread has been going for four years with no response (yea or nay) from Adobe.
      R
      R Schuster 2
      Participating Frequently
      August 27, 2015
      Please add an invert button, Adobe! It would be such a simple solution this problem. I'm only "scanning" black and white negs right now (digital camera, macro lens), so the inversion isn't terribly complex, and I easily created a preset to invert the tone curve on import. But it's a pain to have to work with the tone curve and all the basic adjustments backwards.
        T
        timreeves
        Participant
        July 29, 2015


        Can we get an invert button in lightroom?

        There are countless people using lightroom to digitise film negatives, and with the meteoric rise of DSLR scanning rigs this number of people is only set to rise.

        Can we PLEASE get an "invert" button that allows all the other features such as white balance, fill lights, etc to work NORMALLY, the often given answer of "Just invert your tone curve" is wholly insufficient due to how it interacts with lightrooms other tools.

        Alternatively can we allow colour profiles to be applied concurrently so we can use one "layer" to un-invert and another "layer" to do corrections from there. Some sort of stacked topography that works in the library is desperately needed to fix the mess from exporting to and from between PS and LR. By incorporating a stacked, layered work flow of physical and non physical (PS& LR) edits it would add to the usability of the adobe suite greatly.

        Alternatively, just an invert button, it's not a tricky job!
        T
        timreeves
        Participant
        July 29, 2015
        This feature still hasn't been implemented

        There's still hundreds of articles talking about work arounds and expensive third party colour profiles.

        Come on Adobe, there's literally no reason to not implement this feature.
        J
        jeffk5545Author
        Participant
        August 2, 2012
        Thanks, Walter, for your well-crafted arguments. Apparently Adobe doesn't read their own user forum posts, because I've received exactly **zero** response from Adobe on my post.
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