BW Negative conversion

Antonio_Piepoli · June 9, 2025, 1:25pm

Hi all,

I am attaching a nef of a BW negative I’ve shot and developed. I think the film is a HP5 (don’t let me go and take the strip please :P, I need to work on my archival process). It was developed in rodinal 1:50.

I realise this play is a bit different from what you have used to see here but I would like to improve my scanning workflow.

Thanks!!!

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

20250112_0018_01.nef.xmp (7.0 KB)

20250112_0018.nef (11.0 MB)

Popanz · June 9, 2025, 2:16pm

The question is when
It’s comforting that others are as well forgetting things from time to time.

Antonio_Piepoli · June 9, 2025, 2:39pm

It’s there now! Thanks

Vulpy · June 9, 2025, 2:44pm

It’s a different image - a child with a sword.

Antonio_Piepoli · June 9, 2025, 2:58pm

thank you now it’s fixed.

Popanz · June 9, 2025, 3:15pm

Ok, a first quick render:

20250112_0018.nef.xmp (24,5 KB)

Popanz · June 9, 2025, 7:54pm

Or maybe a softer sepia version

20250112_0018.nef.xmp (22,4 KB)

Thomas_Do · June 9, 2025, 10:21pm

20250112_0018.nef.xmp (11.5 KB)

Terry · June 9, 2025, 10:49pm

I don’t feel I have have done a great job here as the concept was a first for me. I decided to ignore negadoctor and instead used tone curve to invert my image and a second instance of tone curve to improve the contrast using an s curve approach. I feel there are many tricks I would want to work out if this was to become a standard workflow for me.
20250112_0018.nef.xmp (16.8 KB)

paulmatth · June 10, 2025, 8:51am

Trying to respect the backlight… Done in ART.

20250112_0018.jpg.out.arp (11.7 KB)

EmerS · June 10, 2025, 1:24pm

I love the sepia!
I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, or if you uploaded the incorrect xmp files, but for both of your edits, the bloom is blowing out both pictures and neither of them are cropped.

Popanz · June 10, 2025, 1:39pm

Both edits are made with latest AgX build (5.1.0+1108~gc74a95ef9b) Probably that’s the reason - Even so AgX wasn’t used at all. I didn’t use any tone mapper.

EmerS · June 10, 2025, 2:14pm

Ah, that’s why. Thanks for the reply!

photomf · June 10, 2025, 2:25pm

20250112_0018.jpg.out.pp3 (21.9 KB)

dqpcoxeas · June 11, 2025, 1:27pm

My version…

20250112_0018.nef.xmp (21,0 KB)

marcoandres · June 13, 2025, 2:10pm

Another way is to remove the effect of the base layer, by doing the following in Gimp:

Convert the negative from Nikon format to Tiff [use Freeconvert].
Convert to b/w [The negative is in colour]
Sample the base layer [unexposed] by selecting a rectangular area and then blurring it completely to a uniform colour.
Set the foreground colour to that colour [hex code 91919191]
Create a new layer with that colour.
Set the mode of that layer to divide.
Create new layer from visible.
Invert the layer
Select a portion of the inverted negative and copy to a new window.
Do Autolevels to adjust the curve.
Apply the same Autolevels to the entire negative.
Sounds complicated but it is not.

Needed to rotate the negative to adjust for the skew, here is the result after following the steps above.

After colouring it brown platinum:

- List item

marcoandres · June 13, 2025, 2:44pm

This software does a very good job of inverting b/w negs [macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android].
Filmlab
The process is simpler:

Launch and then just drop the “.nef" file in
Convert to b/w.
Rotate first to deskew.
Select the portion of the neg.
Press Recalc to recalculate.
Change the crop back to the entire image.
Export the resulting image [jpg and/or tiff]
Rotate the result by 180 degrees.

Here is the result:

Do a bit more tweaking, if you wish.

paperdigits · June 13, 2025, 3:06pm

But filmlab isn’t free software

marcoandres · June 13, 2025, 4:22pm

Correction. The conversion is with SmartConvert, not Filmlab, the firm is Filmomat, maker of software and products for analog photography

While SmartConvert is not free, Gimp is. One is reminded of this acronym:
TANSTAFL
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch

Here is a comparison of three pieces of software for negative conversion that are not free:
SmartConvert

Filmlab

And Chemvert:

Only Smart convert allows you to fix one part of the neg and apply the fix to the entire negative. Smartconvert seems to do the best job fairly easily. Filmomat

As for cropping Chemvert is text based, while the others allow direct graphical manipulation.

You be the judge of the “best” straight conversion.

paperdigits · June 13, 2025, 6:58pm

I apprecaite that, but the whole purpose of this forum is to accomplish things with Free Software. If you don’t know about Free Software, you can read about it here: Free software - Wikipedia

So while I’m sure the proprietary is great, and there is lots of great proprietary software out there, it misses the point on this forum.