how to process negative images using tone curves in lightroom

Recently I have been taking photos with film cameras using mono film and processing at home. Maybe it is just nostalgia or perhaps a desire to make the photo the experience rather than being seduced by the modern miracles of digital SLR.

Anyway after developing I copied all the negatives with my Nikon D90, Sigma 105mm Macro and light box. I use Lightroom 3 to process all my photos, together with Picasa to act as an easy front end for retrieval and searches. I was surprised to discover that neither has a standard command to simply convert negatives to positives. But this can be easily achieved in Lightroom and even applied in batch mode by making a simple preset.

Here you can see some positive and negative imges in Lightroom.

From WebImages

Select a negative and choose Develop mode, and then select the Tone Curve, which you simply reverse so that instead of a straight line from bottom left to top right it is a straight line from top left to bottom right. THis causes black to become white, white black and all shades to be progressively reversed with mid grey remaining mid grey.

From WebImages

From WebImages

To do this just click on each end point and drag either to top or bottom.

From WebImages

From WebImages

The positive result is shown below.

From WebImages

I then saved these setting in a Lightroom Preset.

From WebImages

I used the following settings when saving the preset. Note I had turned on 'Auto Tune' which had a dramatic effect on the output of what otherwise were quite flat negatives. I called the Preset 'Negative'

From WebImages

Now in the Grid you can select all of the negatives, and then apply this Negative preset to all of them in a single batch. The Negative preset was at the bottom of a long list of supplied presets.

From WebImages

And here is the result.

From WebImages

Note

Because the Tone Curve created above inverts the luminosity then other commands effecting luminosity will also be reversed. For example increasing the blackness will in fact increase highlights, increasiung brightness will darken.