On Sun, 01 Feb 2015 18:41:32 +0000, "Dennis@home"
wrote:

On 01/02/2015 11:24, Steve wrote:

Thanks. I looked into this a while back and was told that a scanner
couldn't make them positives; I'd need to have them developed first.
Has the technology advanced, or did I misunderstand?


Scanners will work with any developed film, positive or negative..

however slide film (positive) has a colourless backing so it shows the
correct colours when viewed in normal light.

Negative film still has the colour filter layers in place (they are
bleached out in slide film) which gives a strong orangeish look to the
negatives. You can correct for this in software but you need a scanner
with enough colour depth to allow full correction, one that only does
(about) 8 bit colour depth will struggle as will making jpegs and then
correcting them, some subjects will look ok some wont.

AFAIR, that 'strong orangeish' cast is called the 'mask layer' (or
requires a masking filter to deal with it when printing - it _has_
been quite a long time since I last studied photochemistry and
processing as a hobby interest where I never went as far as attempting
colour printing from home processed colour negative film although I
did process a roll of FP4 to create monochrome slides by way of an
experiment).

My previous attempts with a cheapish Aldi document/film scanner
produced rather abysmal results with colour negatives so I guess it
fell far short of requirements and foul of that mask layer (I'd hoped
I could do a better job than Max Spielmans had done with the photo cd
images taken off 4 rolls of colour negative film one of which I'd
tried to scan.

Closer inspection with good illumination and a jeweler's loupe
revealed they'd actually extracted about as much as was possible from
the cheapish 35mm film stock I'd used. Much to my chagrin, it turned
out that a mere 3Mpxel P&S digital camera could do a slightly better
job than my film SLR (at least when comparing the results with the
cheapish film stock I'd used - it might have been different story if I
had decide to blow a lot more cash on 'superior' film stock).
--
J B Good