I thought that I would share my process for prepping the glass plate negatives for the art project. This takes a lot longer than one would think, well to do it write at least.
I started by shooting the negatives with an LED light panel for a constant and steady light source. The issue with the LED light source was the light was center weighted, creating a white vignette around the edges as shown in the sample below. After shooting close to 75 of the plates, I deleted all of the images and started back at the drawing board.
[[posterous-content:pid___0]]I created a lightbox using a cardboard box, sketching paper, shaped to make a concave white interior for the box, and two Nissin i866 flashes set at 1/8 power pointing in at opposite sides of the boxes. The result was even, well defined light. Saturday, I shot all 150 glass plate negatives. It took me roughly two hours, with my oldest daughter assisting me in organizing and storing the plates once they were shot. This process is creating a 10MP image for me to work with.
[[posterous-content:pid___1]]I brought the negatives into Lightroom and began organizing them based on the subjects in the scene; landscapes, people, houses and agriculture. Once I had all of the negatives classified, I brought each them into Photoshop and converted them from a negative to a positive image. This was a manual process completed using the Tone Curve. I didn't cheat and use an Action or some automatic conversion, because each negative was unique in it's conversion needs. Some of the negatives needed to be lighted during the process, and most of them needed to be darkened. Once the positive conversion was done, I brought the image back into Lightroom and organized it, similar to the negatives. This process took three and half hours to convert and organize all 150 positive images to get the desired results as shown below.
[[posterous-content:pid___2]]I have only started processing a half a dozen of the images and there is good reason. It is a time consuming process. In the case of the house with a family sitting on the door steps, there is some damage to negative in the lower left corner as well as above the houses on the right. There are also many micro-blemishes in the house structure as well as in the sky. I bring each image back into Photoshop and begin the clean up process. The first step is to reconvert the image to black and white. While the negative were black and white to being with, I photographed them in Raw, which allows the best control for touch up work but also means the images are in color, which is evident in the blue spot of damage in the lower left side of the frame. That is because the damage is an orange substance on the glass plate. When it goes through the conversion from negative to positive image, orange becomes blue. So I convert the image to black and white using Nik Software Silver Effects Pro which allows me the greatest control in the black and white conversion process.
[[posterous-content:pid___3]]The above image is the result of four hours of hand touch up and sadly it isn't finished yet. I am proud to say that I have not added a single element during the retouch process, meaning I did not use any other photographs or other mediums to fix the damaged areas of the image. I simply have used the clone and heal tools in Photoshop to rebuild the damaged areas of the image. Sadly I still have another hour or more worth of work on this one to get it completed to my satisfaction. it is time consuming, but it is leading to a project that is bigger than just fixing the images for print, so it is completely worth it. I am very excited about this project, if you can't tell. Good and creative things are a foot over here.
I hope you found this little guide on converting negatives to positives helpful, I know it helped me to write about it. Until next time... make something beautiful, just for the sake of making it.
