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Tag: family archive

April 30, 2023

How to Quickly Turn a Scanned Negative into a Positive Image on a Mac

If you think a 90-year-old negative is a lost cause, think again. Here’s how to bring it back to life.

Sure, photo negatives aren’t cool anymore. They represent 19th century technology. Most of us aren’t housing a roll of Kodachrome in our camera bags these days. I get it.

But there’s well over a century of family history locked away in millions of shoe boxes in the back of closets… all in those negative strips. There should be a way to rescue them.

Correction:
There should be an easy way to rescue them and quickly bring the negative images back to life into positive form.

I’ve been traveling that complex journey for the past months since I’ve taken ownership of all of my family’s photo archives (shoe boxes) after my father passed away.

Digital Conversion
So, I bought a slide and negative converter to handle the bulk of the work.

It’s fast. It’s a one-click solution. The results are mostly solid.

But the Wolverine couldn’t capture the full real estate of the larger negatives dating back to the 1930s (2 ½” x 3 ¾”).

I turned to my old flatbed scanner to handle the large negatives. But then I needed a way (an easy way!) to transform each negative into its positive doppelganger.

Adobe Solutions
There are any number of tutorials on YouTube that demonstrate how to do that in Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, and they all promote the concept of how easy and fun it is.

‘Fun’ is code for it’s not really that quick. Sure, it may be relatively easy, but it still requires about five minutes of fiddling to bring the image to life in the positive universe.

A few minutes may not seem like a lot of time, but fiddling is not a precise exercise, and five minutes can easily turn into fifteen.

Apple Photos (OS X):
As a Mac user, I wanted to see if I could find a native solution without having to rely on the muscle of Adobe. The good news is I found a couple good options.

If you already use the Apple Photos app on your Mac, you can do the conversion right there. It’s not quite one click. But it’s straight forward. Let’s give it a shot using a negative of my grandmother Rae from 1935 with my father and uncle. (My dad is the tiny one!)

  • Upload your negative into Apple Photos.
  • Select it.
  • Click on ‘Edit.’

Select the ‘Curves’ drop down.
You’ll see a histogram of the photo with a straight white line positioned diagonally from bottom left to top right.

To invert the negative image to its positive version:
Click on the bottom left of the line and drag it all the way to the top left. Then click on the top right of the line and drag it to the bottom right.

Voilà! Your negative image is now inverted and displays in positive form.

Then, you can continue to tweak the image from there as you choose. (And that’s where you can go down the rabbit hole of tweaking.)

Using Apple Photos to perform this trick is actually quite similar to Adobe Lightroom’s interface.

Preview App
You can also use Apple’s ‘Preview’ app to bring your negatives back to the positive universe.

It’s a near-identical exercise:

  • Select ‘Tools.’
  • Then ‘Adjust Color.’

Can You Invert a Negative Image in One Click?
Okay. None of these options are one-click solutions. So, Is there one? I figured any number of online photo management websites must have a negative-reversal filter built in.

I checked out Shutterfly, Google Photos, Amazon Photos and Canva.

Nope.

Yes, there are apps out there that promote the ability to reverse a negative in one click. But after giving it some more thought, I just didn’t want to add yet another piece of software into my workflow.

So, I canceled my adventure down this particular rabbit hole. Enduring a few clicks to turn a negative into a positive image will suffice.

Diagonal-Line Maneuver
The truth is I already do most of my photo management work in Adobe Lightroom. The diagonal-line maneuver in the Tone Curve section works just fine (just like with Apple’s ‘Photos’ and ‘Preview’ apps).

The good news is there’s a choice on the software to use if you don’t want to take the Adobe path.

And now I need to get back to work on my time machine. There’s still almost a century of negatives to go through.

I’m bringing the past back to life, one image at a time.

I’d say maybe that’s worth the five minutes.

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December 31, 2022

How a Digital Photo Frame Helps Me Remember my Dad

I’ve set up a photo gallery of my father’s life on this digital photo frame. It’s powered up next to me at my desk and rotates through his images across the years.

My father is gone. I knew this day would eventually come, but I was still entirely unprepared for the terrible moment when it arrived.

He passed away on December 15th. While he wasn’t in the best of shape, his death was sudden and a surprise. He was in rehab at the time and was medically stable. The nurse had just been in to see him. When she came back, he wasn’t there anymore.

That was it.

My dad always liked to play by his own rules. So, it feels appropriate that he left this world on his own terms. He had always told me that he wanted to die in his sleep. This seemed pretty close. He wasn’t in pain, and it was quick.

He was 89. (Here’s his obituary.)

My father had a full life, and throughout his 80s he often told me that he didn’t expect that he would be sticking around that long. He also said in recent years that he was okay with passing on, because he had enjoyed his life.

Donald Lester had “lived.”

One Last Present
A week before he died, I ordered a digital photo frame to give him for the holidays. My plan was to set it up in his rehab room to share some family photos with him.

After my success placing an Amazon Echo Dot Wi-Fi speaker next to his bedside so his could listen to his favorite tunes from the ‘40s and ‘50s, this was to be my next step. I wanted to provide a little more personal tech support to help make his time away from home more comfortable.

Plus, my father loved technology. (I got that from him.) I knew he’d get a kick out of the digital photo frame.

But I never got the chance to give it to my dad.

A Different Use
So, the Nixplay frame sat in its unopened box on the floor of my home office. I’ve been wondering what to do it with. Of course, I knew I could send it back.

Instead, I’ve decided to hold onto it.

I would finish what I had set out to do… but with a modified purpose. I would still load it with family photos, but with pictures of him… for me.

His Pictures Tell his Story
I powered up the digital frame, and it’s now in place on a shelf by my desk.

It glows warmly with images of my father and cycles through his photos across the years. It’s one way to keep his story alive.

He was a born-and-bred New Yorker. He traveled the world including Africa and into the Amazon rain forest. He had his suits tailored from Hong Kong, and he loved to wear his bowlers and straw hats. And he was a life-long Yankees fan.

He was a real character.

A Digital Candle
I think setting up this digital frame near me is also a way to help me process all of this.

As you might imagine, there’s been a lot ‘to do’ over these past weeks. I haven’t had much time to truly feel the impact. The loss. As that happens in the months ahead, this frame will serve as a comforting support for me and my family.

It’s a little candle for me.

Holding onto the Memories
Over the past months, I’ve been slowly digitizing some of the photos that my mother had placed in thick albums decades ago when I was growing up. She was the family archivist. (I can’t believe it’s already been 16 years since she passed.)

Moving forward, of course I’ll continue my family-photo archiving project. And I’ll keep feeding the frame with images of my father throughout his life… and mine.

It’s one way to honor his memory and to help me remember the good times.

I miss you, Dad.

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