I’m about to embark on scanning a gazillion of our negatives from the last century, but I don’t want to have to do a precision “scan” on all of them. To select the best, what I would like to do is to have the live view from my tethered camera actually show in real time a reasonable version of the positive image as I run the negative strips in front of the camera. I’m currently designing/fabricating a system that will take the bare strips, as I hate having to load the negative strips into carriers for fast review, it’s very time consuming and requires a lot of handling of the strips.
So does Adobe (or in my case Canon) allow any color/luminance profiles to be applied to the live view with their tethering software, that could be used to allow real-time viewing of the positive images, or is this something that could be created as a stand-alone, or a plug in to some other generic tethering software?
I don’t tether myself but pretty sure you can apply a Lightroom inversion preset to the import ‘hot’ folder.
I have also recently read of someone using tethering software to tune their RGB light source in order to neutralise the inverted colour negative film base. Regrettably I can’t remember the tethering software or where I read it but it was fairly unique in that respect I think.
You may consider creating a custom picture style and transferring it to your camera. At least with my Nikon camera, the selected picture style is displayed in live view and transferred as a real-time preview to the tethering software.
I did something similar with my Nikon (using https://nikonpc.com/), but stopped using it after a short while. For black-and-white films, a simple inversion might be sufficient, but for colour films, you have to make sure you balance out the orange mask using the curves. However, I would suggest to use a little less contrast than you would in a NLP conversion, as otherwise you will have difficulty recognising very thin or very dense negatives.
Thank you for the correction, you’re right. Apparently, in the software’s curves tool, a point starting on higher brightness values cannot be set lower than any other point applied to lower tonal values. That’s quite unfortunate.
Yes, it is, and Canon users have been complaining about it for years! Hence Canon users would like to see it as an option in NLP.
However, now I have played with LR tethering some more, I realize that it is actually using the camera’s direct output for the live view, complete with all the processing applied to create the EVF image from the raw. I suspect that there is no way to intercept that stream in real time & invert it etc.
However, does NLP have an LR Development Profile that could be used on the negative image once shot, so that the positive image is displayed immediately in the background window to the tethering window?
Just for reference I remembered where I had seen that quote. Perhaps it might be built in to the new standalone version of NLP? That ControlMyNikon software is Windows only I think
“The second image shows the negative scan using RGBs that I individually adjusted to produce the cleanest image while looking at a positive view in my tethered PC. I use Control My Nikon software for tethered control. This software package has an option to show a positive view of negatives.”
“I would definitely add that a critical part of this method is the Control My Nikon software that allows me to see a real-time live view of a positive version of the image. This lets me see the immediate effect as I increase or decrease the intensity of each separate channel.”
This dates from September 2020 and is from the FB forum “Digitizing film with a digital camera”. It concerns a combined RGB and white light panel of his own design which seems to give excellent results. Bringing it up to date he is now producing a ‘Mk.2’ with top specification Waveform LEDs. Well worth a look.
So here is what you can do. Get some cheap Feelworld 7 inch on camera monitor. I got mine for $100 . Make sure that unit has ability to take LUT table loaded from flash card. So here is the process. Take one negative image and invert it in Photoshop using layers. It may not be precise . Export this correction as LUT in Photoshop. Load this LUT on card and install it on Feelworld monitor. Have your camera output HDMI connected to Feelworld. Activate said LUT. On you camera monitor you will see roughly converted positive image - given it’s live view you can advance film in holder and immediately see it inverted. It will be far from perfect but at least it will take away a guesswork when you try to see the negative without straining your imagination and invert it in your brain. That worked for me.
Another option is to use free VLC app (free and widely available) . It has image inversion mode buried somewhere in menu. I don’t remember all details but you can make VLC take the input from your camera as if camera were a simple webcam. In inverse mode you will see the negative images as positives. Of course there will be color cast and colors shifted, but again you will be seeing positive images in live view mode. HTH