are you looking old negatives or old photo album your cupborad

 

if you have a lot of old negatives laying around somewhere in your cupboard or your old photo albums just like so.

What a better way to kill time rather than trying to develop them in Photoshop?

However, the quality of the image that comes out of these negatives depends upon three things.

How you light these negatives when you take a picture of them.

So if you have a macro lens, that would be the best.

And number three, obviously - the qual it of the film.

Now here comes the important question - how do we take a picture of this film?

Simple, make the screen of your phone white or run a widescreen video and then keep the film in front of it and simply take a picture.

Make sure not any other light in the room is falling on this film and then take a picture.

It would be best if it's a dark room.

However, whoops, mother's calling, I gotta pick it up.

Now when you take a picture, keep the film away from the screen.

Here's the picture of the film touching the screen.

However, when you zoom in, have a look, look at these pixels and these banding.

They are not from the film, they are from the phone, they are from the light, because they're so close that each pixel of the light is going to show up.

However, when you do keep a gap, what happens is when you focus on the film, this gets blurred.

And that's what I did in the second photo.

This is too much DIY, have a look at this.

I just kept a container on this side, another container on the other side and placed the film on top of it just to create a gap and then

And all these greens that you see, that's just because the ISO of the camera was too high and I was too lazy to set up a tripod and

Now again, if you had a macro lens, you could have made it even bigger.

However, I just had to take it with my 24-70 because I don't have that kind of macro money.

Once you take the picture, the rest of the magic will happen in Photoshop.

Click on the Adjustment layer icon and then choose Invert.

Now, we need to correct the color, take away the blues and all of that can happen with Curves.

So click on the Adjustment layer icon and then choose Curves.

Now in here, what color in the scene or any of these scenes should have been grey or neutral?

So in my opinion, of course, his shirt should have been grey.

So select the middle eyedropper, click on that one and just click on his shirt and have a look.

You can also try clicking on different areas to see what looks best for you.

Now do keep in mind, this is totally non-destructive.

We can adjust this at any point of time.

And also, this is art, you don't have to get it absolutely accurate.

You just have to make it look attractive.

All we have to do is to increase some contrast in here.

So take this slider from the left to the right.

You can also hold the Alt key or the Option key just when you begin to see these artifacts in the image.

That means the details are going away from the dark areas.

Similarly, let's do the same for the bright areas.

And then you can work the Curves and maybe increase the Contrast a little bit.

So, if you want to adjust and edit the colors further, you can go to the different channels - Red, Green or Blue, and make manual adjustments.

However, to make Curves visually simpler,there's one more Adjustment layer and that is called Color Balance.

Click on the Adjustment layer icon and then choose Color Balance, just right there.

Now do keep in mind Color Balance is just a simplified version of Curves.

Anything you can do in Color Balance can be done with Curves.

Check out this video if you want to know more about it.

It's just that Color Balance makes it simpler.

So we want to target the mid tones.

So select the Mid tones and then just add a little more Yellow to it, probably just keep it the way it is, probably in the shadows,you want to

So let's go to the Shadows and just add Magenta to it.

And a little bit Yellow, probably some Red or the opposite of it.

You can take all the time in the world to adjust these colors.

Once you're happy with the colors, all you got to do is to just crop it out.

Now for different images, you might have to adjust everything differently.

Have a look, this is me and my mother and probably all of these photos were taken by my father.

Anyway, once you are happy with all of this just crop it.

So select the Rectangular Marquee tool or any tool of your choice.

I'm going to make a square, sorry, a rectangle right there, press C for the Crop tool, hit Enter or Return..boom.

Of course, we need to crop it properly, and you can do that.