Every once in a while, I will get a special request from family, friends or a client asking me if I would be able to do something with cherished old photographs. Sometimes it’s taking an old print they have and giving it new life. Sometimes it’s taking one of the old curved surface prints and photographing it so that it could be put into a modern day frame. And sometimes it’s converting film negatives from years past into digital files or prints, and that’s what I’m going to be talking about today!

When given film negatives – I am always super careful with them. These little pieces of film are the original creations of a photographer from years ago. If these get ruined – there is nothing we can do to recover what’s lost. So it’s important to be very gentle when handling them. The first step is to actually place your negatives over some sort of light source. A light box would be ideal, but I don’t have one of those – so i just use one of the many windows in our house. I very carefully tape the negative to the window at a convenient height and then using my macro lens, I photograph the negative. Now, it’s important to bear in mind that whatever colors are outside your window will be reflected into your image. So if there’s green everywhere – you may have a green tone to your images.

Once I have the negatives all photographed, I pull them into photoshop. The first thing you might need to do is crop them in. Some older cameras were different formats (or crops) than we have today. So if you need to do that – go ahead. Next I usually check to make sure it’s grayscale – that way if there were any weird color tones – they won’t be noticeable. Then you just hit “Command + I” for mac or “Control + I” for PC to Invert the color scheme on your image. And that’s it! If you want to add any adjustments to levels or anything you can. Sometimes I’ll do a little tweaking to the contrast and things. Sometimes I’ll convert the image back to RGB and then add a warm overtone. But it’s a pretty easy and simple process.

I also put together a fun little video on how I do it here. Enjoy!