learning hub

A Tip for Viewing Negatives

People come into our shop wanting prints off negatives and ask if they can use our "device" that will let them view their negatives as a positive. They are amazed when we pull out our light-box and a smartphone!

By enabling “Invert Colours” or "Negative Colours" under your smartphone’s “Accessibility” setting, the camera turns into a viewer that allows photographic negatives to be viewed as positives. Depending on your phone it will be something like Settings, Accessibility, Vision, Negative colours or Colour inversion.

You need a well lit background - we use a professional lightbox in our store but for home we suggest a blank PC or tablet screen - just open up a blank document.

We don't recommend using this system for capturing a copy of the photo as phones pick up a flicker from the light box and screens produce a texture from the array of pixels.

Getting Negatives converted to Digital

We can convert negatives and slides to digital but some people have hundreds or more so this can get quite expensive.

To do it yourself there are two options:

• You could buy your own flatbed scanner capable of scanning negatives but this requires a lot of time sitting at a computer
• Most opt for this Slide/Negative converter we sell as no computer is required.

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