Digitising negatives with EM1 - grateful for advice

Hi folks,

I've just been going through my late parents' things and have come across quite a big bundle of monochrome negatives, of various sizes. I'd like to transfer them to (positive) digital files.

I've made myself a light-box and a jig for holding my Olympus EM1 with its 60mm Macro lens. When I capture the negatives in this way, I'm happy with the results once I process them (ie turn them into positive images) in Adobe LightRoom.

But here's the problem. Only about one in ten of the negatives are actually interesting enough to transfer. What I'd like to be able to do is see the positive version of the image immediately on screen so I don't have to go through the rigmarole of getting a beautiful sharp RAW file for every single one.

One possibility would be if the camera had a way to output a negative jpeg but I've looked among all the Art filters and can't find anything that would give me a negative. Am I missing something?

Another possibility would be if I could shoot video in negative and then just pass all the negatives in front of the camera so I could see which ones would be worth capturing in RAW.

I'd be very grateful for suggestions, ideally using my Lightbox, my EM1 and my macro lens!

All the best, Jon

Jon,

London, UK

There are smartphone apps that convert negatives to positive images. You could point a smartphone camera at the LCD on the back of your EM1 to do the conversion.

Thanks Ted, Much appreciated. I'll give that a go.

I have used the same lens with a Panasonic GX1 to duplicate color slides, and it works fine.., no actually it works brilliantly.

But I am now myself busy digitizing hundreds of B/W and color negatives and I purchased a scanner for the purpose. It is just much more convenient, and the scanner driver already turns it into positive so the preview is easy to filter out what to scan and what not; and the final scan is already converted, dust removed and color corrected so I do minimal editing in post processing. I got the Epson V600 and I find it very capable.

Olympus recently added tethering support for the OMD-EM1 (i.e. to hook it up with a computer). I did not check, but if that software offers an inversion option, you might be in business.

Some time back I did the same with my dad's old B&W negs, many of sizes that I've never seen. At that time I used an Epson V700 scanner with film holders, some negs fitted the medium format size, others I had to make custom holders from black mat cardboard.

My policy was to scan everything properly as discoveries were made in what seemed at times unlikely images. Usually finding long lost relatives/ancestors in some small part of some random happy holiday group photos.

Regards..... Guy

I had a similar opportunity, inheriting lots of color and monochrome slides, negatives, plus my own film from years past.

I found that VueScan preview can scan an entire flatbed scanner full of negatives and present then converted in the preview screen. You can use this to quickly identify the ones you would like to convert. (This is not actually using the flatbed for conversion, but rather as a quick and dirty virtual light-table to sort. You may even be able to not bother with the transparency option, and just let the (white-ish) cover serve as the "black" for your scan of the negatives.)

However, I also found that a 100 slides at a time scanner could scan and convert batches with about the same total work as the preview scan--so that is the way I have mostly gone, including negative conversion. I have used VueScan with corrections as needed in Lightroom.

I suspect that the OP method of conversion using the E-M1 in a purpose built lightbox is better, optically than using a scanner--even a good quality slide scanner. For a (more than complete) discussion of the topic, see Scannerless Digital Capture... from Luminous Landscape. The PP portion is possibly something you will find useful.

This is something that I would like to do. Could you post a picture of your setup so I can get an idea of how you did it so I can build one too?