Some are asking for whole new controls, but there is one simple way to enable more efficient negative editing by reversing the tools. If a checkbox existing in a reasonable place or standalone tool, that enabled ‘Negative Tool Processing’ the problem could be solved. The problem is that using the color histogram or luminosity curves to reverse the negative to a positive, still mean the exposure and HDR tools are backwards. Thus, the highlight tool is for blacks and the black tool for highlights. Reducing the slider increases exposure and increasing the slider decreases exposure. By simply reversing these tools (the function and direction of slider) negatives could be quickly turned to positives with a style that reverses the negative, and then the basic tools would function as they normally do with digital images. It would not matter if the digital image was a photograph of a negative, or a scan of negative, it would simply work.
@Walter, I have that plug in. In my 20 year experience, plug ins come and go. I have never been able to get it to work well enough on my system. It makes the negative strong in terms of contrast and tones, but doesn’t reverse it. I use a monochrom so there is no color channel but that does much better with black and white 120mm negatives. My request is a simple process baked into the system. Then the toolkit does a great job of getting a starting point. The biggest issue is that film negatives are only about 20% of my work and capture one does such a great job it is very difficult to reverse thinking. Thanks for the tip, and I’ll revisit. However, I believe the long-term solution is to simply reverse the basic controls for negatives so that the workflow is seamless regardless of the image source.
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