Positive and Negative
Digitizing a negative
(Turning a negative into a positive)
It is really fun to digitize a negative and by doing so you will learn some key editing tools using the 'curves' tool. You can do this lesson entirely using your phone and the Snapseed app.
The first thing you need to do is find and photograph some negatives (ask a parent/carer to see if they have some). If you can't find any, scroll down to the resource section of this lesson and save some of mine to your device.
Ideally you need a lightbox. But who has one of those at home?! You can still get good results by being creative with what you have in your own home. This is my set up:
3. I actually have a light box that I bought on Amazon for £5. But the light that came with it was not bright enough for this. So I found a square light that we use to light up the loft. But before I settled on these tools I experimented with a light from a torch, the light from a computer/tablet screen and the flashlight app on a phone. All with good and sometimes interesting results (You can see the monitor pixels which can look cool).
4. Whatever light you use, you have to 'diffuse' it by placing a white piece of plastic (such as the lightbox in my example) between the light source and the negative.
5. Once you are set up you need place your negative over the lightbox and take a photograph using the digital camera on your phone. Get as close as you can before you go out of focus.
6. Once you have taken your photographs, follow the instructions on this YouTube video to digitize your negative:
7. Add a nice border round the edited image, then go back to Google classroom and turn in the before and after shot.
Resources:
Ask your parent/carers if they have any old negatives for you to practice on. If not, you can always use mine below. Save them to your device. These negatives are from photographs I took when I was 16 (so a loooong time ago!):
WAGOLL
Below is an example of the before and after photographs you will create following this lesson:
Positive to Negative (inverting)
As a fun alternative to the 'digitizing negatives' lesson above, you could fake creating a negative using your own photographs.
Look through your gallery of images on your phone. Choose a selection to edit.
Watch this YouTube video which shows you how to use Snapseed to edit your photograph to make it appear a negative.
3. Add a nice border around your edited image.
4. Go back to Google classroom and turn in.
WAGOLL
Below is an example of the edited images you be able to create following this lesson:
