Nothing like a challenge to get your thought processes going. How about some 60 or 70 year old black and white film negatives in unusual (5.5 cm x 5.5 cm) sizes that you want to see the positive image of ? In the past I have had scanners with a transparency capability but mainly that is for the standard 35mm negatives that some many of us would have. There are also dedicated devices for that type of negative scanning that can capture to PC or storage device.
In this case that approach won’t work – the negatives are too big and a quick google suggested that professional and very expensive devices might work but at this point I am only looking to see what the negative reveals. A first attempt with a reflective wedge made of cardboard and foil and placed over the image like this seemed to be defeated by my particular Epson WF-7525 A3 Flatbed software which showed an option for film scanning in professional mode but prevented its use since it knows this model does not have a transparency adapter.
One of the ways you can view a negative better is to use a lightbox which is defined as
a flat box having a side of translucent glass or plastic and containing an electric light, so as to provide an evenly lighted flat surface or even illumination, such as in a studio.
In the absence of a light box I thought of other light sources like lamps, torches or a flash even but each of these have issues like heat – light not being equally distributed or even the fact that modern led torches end up producing multiple light points – one from each led.
Then I had a thought – occasionally I use my phone to light up parts of equipment that are in darkness – what if you could use the screen to light up something rather than the camera flash. A quick in the app store got me Lightbox Extra. This let me backlight the negative but my negatives in some cases are 5 wide so not ideal. The same app works on the Ipad though and this allowed me to view three or four together.
Next step then was to take a photo of the backlit negative. Simple – use my phone camera – and voila – a picture of the negative. The final piece is how to see it – enter another app from the app store – NegativeMe. Simply install it – open it and press start to get an option to get the image from albums or camera. Select camera and the image of the negative I just taken and there it is in incredible clarity as a positive image.
So there you have it – with an electronic light box and an application you can see those hidden treasures on your film negatives. The two apps used are just examples – there will be lots of others that can provide the same or more functionality – like filters to change the image after processing if from negative on whichever platform you need to do this – IOS/Android/Windows/OSX.
A final note – as a test I used the ipad with lightbox app on the flatbed scanner as a backlight – this also works and might end up being the solution I use – along with the free application Gimp to process the number of negatives I want to process and it allows you simply and quickly to invert and crop the images. In this case I placed the ipad with the lightbox app running on top of the negatives on the flatbed and scanned as normal – no different scanner settings other than testing different scan resolutions.