Tag: photography

Scanning Film Tutorial

Scanning film tutorial, showing how to process 35mm film in Photoshop CS5. Start with your negative, be sure your scanner doesn't export the image as a positive. You want your image to looks like this. Negative is brown, orange and inverted. I cropped the image out of the film reel already, but you can crop anytime. This is a photo from 1978 when my mum graduated university so the negatives are quite old. Add an "invert" correction layer. Find that option here (Layer>Add Correction Layer>Invert) Or here (the inverted circle at the bottom of the layers panel) Your negative is now a positive! But it's pretty blue, huh? To fix this we'll edit the curves. Add the 'curves' adjustment layer, it'll be in the same place 'invert' was. Then in the Adjustments window, we'll click on the dark eyedropper. Use that to click on the darkest part of your photo. I chose the deepest part of her graduation gown sleeve. But the photo is still kind of muddy. We need to use the white eyedropper to pick up the lightest part of the photo now. I'll use her white sash. And just like that we have pretty good colours! As a final step, I'll use the curves' dark and light sliders to adjust the contrast of the photo. Play with the sliders until you get something you're happy with! Don't forget to use adjustment layers if you want to do any other fixes, since they're not destructive you can always turn them on/off if you're not happy with an edit. Here's my finished version compared to a print I have from the same roll of film. This print is also from the 70s. The print is very rich but really unnatural compared to what I've got from the negatives. Though, if you want this look I'm sure you could use adjustment layers to replicate this effect. So go forth and process your negatives yourself. It's quite easy!

I got back into film around two years ago and I’m still learning a lot. One of the things I really wanted to do was scan my own negatives. This gives me more control over my images and it’s cheaper in the long run.

So I ended up making this tutorial for myself a while back to help me remember the steps of the process. In this tutorial I used an old photo of my mum from the 70s at her university graduation. It was a good negative to test because: at the time I was waiting for my lab to finish developing my first roll of my own film, I wanted to try processing a negative to make sure I could do it myself (and if I couldn’t, I’d ask my lab to continue doing it for me), I have prints from these negatives that I can compare with.

I’m using Photoshop CS5 for this tutorial.

Q&AAll Art (without update posts)Photography

Photography Corner #7

Digital colour photo of the side of Ho's Team Barber Hairstylist in Toronto, with all sorts of LGBTQ+ support painted directly on the bricks. A "Church Street Mural Project".

In 2023 I inherited my mother-in-law’s old mini DSLR, gave it a real good clean and replaced the swollen battery. Since then I’ve been having a real fun time with it! It’s so small and easy to pop in my bag and the zoom on this lil’ guy is so incredibly good.

These photos were my first foray back into photo editing. I haven’t done any proper photography since college (2008-2012) so go easy on me. I’m still re-learning how to do it.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5, Edited in Photoshop
October 2023, Toronto
Photography

Photography Corner #1

Colour film photo of a lake up in Port Severn. It's very overcast and the trees came out very dark.

So in 2023 I started getting back into photography and more specifically film photography. For our honeymoon I’d borrowed a friend’s Samsung Slim Zoom and really enjoyed using it, there’s something about the colours and graininess of film that I just love so much.

I’ll be posting these irregularly and I’m not going to stress about it AT ALL. No schedule, just maybe 10 photos at a time. I might post them on tumblr too but we’ll see.

Samsung Slim Zoom, Fujifilm 400
June 2023, Port Severn
Photography