Film negative to positive

How to turn a negative into a picture

1. Photograph the film. Put the negative on a light box, or on a phone or laptop screen showing plain white at full brightness, and photograph it straight from above. Leave a little clear film edge around the picture.
2. Open the photo here and pick the film: Colour negative (orange film), B&W negative (grey film) or Slide (already a positive).
3. Check the film base. The swatch shows the colour read from the border. If the border shows the light box or a hand instead of film, press Tap film edge and tap a strip of clear, unexposed film, such as the gap between two frames.
4. Fix the colour if needed. Press Tap something grey and tap a road, a white shirt in shade or a grey wall; then fine-tune exposure, contrast and saturation.
5. Or go live. Press Live camera and move the phone over the strip to see each frame as a positive. Press Lock colours and tap the clear film between two frames so the colours hold still, then Capture the ones worth keeping.
6. Crop and download. A strip is split into frames on its own; switch to Crop & frames to adjust a box, straighten it, and download one picture or all of them as a ZIP.

Why a plain invert comes out blue

Colour negative film is not grey where nothing was exposed; it is orange. Wikipedia describes the "overall dull orange tint" as "an automatic color-masking feature" that "ultimately results in improved color reproduction" (Negative (photography), fetched 2026-10-18). The mask sits under the whole picture, so a plain invert, which is what most free online converters do, turns the orange into its opposite and the picture comes out cold and blue.

This tool reads the orange base first and divides it out of each channel, then inverts. A worked example with a base of R 255, G 153, B 89:

Real film is not that tidy: its dyes are not pure, each film stock and each lab scan differ, and the camera adds its own colour. That is why auto levels then stretch each channel between its darkest and brightest 0.5 % (adjustable), and why a grey tap is there to finish the job.

What it cannot do

• It cannot recover detail the phone photo did not capture. A phone photo of a 35 mm frame holds far less than a film scanner sees; fine grain, small text and deep shadows are limited by the photo, not by this page.
• Colours are an estimate, not the lab's print. The mask and levels are worked out from the picture itself; faded or unusual film, mixed light or a tinted screen shifts the result, and a grey tap is the fix.
• It does not remove dust or scratches. Blow the film clean before photographing; specks on a negative show as white dots on the positive.
• It does not straighten a strongly tilted photo. Straighten turns the frame up to 15°, but a photo taken at an angle stays a trapezoid; hold the phone parallel to the film.
• The live view is lower resolution than Capture. It is drawn at most 960 pixels wide so it keeps up with the camera; judge sharpness on the captured still, not on the live view. Where the browser has no photo mode (it lacks ImageCapture, as Safari and Firefox do), Capture is the video frame at the stream's own resolution, which can be well below the camera's full photo resolution, and the page says which it used.
• A blocked camera means no live view. If the browser or its settings refuse the camera, the page says so and stays in photo mode: take or open a photo instead, which converts the same way. Torch appears only where the camera reports one (mostly Android Chrome).
• Strip splitting needs visible gaps. Frames are split where a line across the strip is clear film; a very dark night scene can look like a gap, so set the number of frames by hand when the guess is wrong.

Questions

Why does a colour negative turn blue when I just invert it?

Colour negative film has an orange base, the built-in colour mask, which is in every part of the negative including the picture. Inverting turns that orange into its opposite, a strong blue-cyan. A mid grey photographed through a mask of R 255, G 153, B 89 reads about 127, 76, 44; a plain invert gives 128, 179, 211, a blue-grey. Dividing each channel by the mask first and then inverting gives 128, 128, 129, the grey back.

How do I photograph a negative to convert it?

Lay the film on an even light source, such as a light box or a tablet or laptop showing a plain white screen at full brightness, switch off the room light so nothing reflects off the film, and hold the phone parallel to the film so the frame is not a trapezoid. Include a little of the clear film edge around the frame so the mask can be read from it. If the screen's pixels show in the photo, lift the film a few millimetres off the screen or put a sheet of paper between them.

Is the photo uploaded?

No. The photo is opened and converted inside this page by your browser and never sent anywhere. The live camera view is converted frame by frame on the device; no video is recorded and no frame leaves the phone. Downloads are new pictures drawn on a canvas, so no EXIF data, location or camera model is copied into them. The page counts only an anonymous page view and one fixed event name when a photo is opened, the live camera starts, a capture is taken or a picture is downloaded, never the photo or its name.

Can I see the positive live through the phone camera, like a negative viewer?

Yes. Press Live camera and hold the phone over the film on a light box: the rear camera's picture is turned into a positive about as fast as the camera delivers frames, in colour or black and white. Without a lock, the orange mask is re-read from the edge of every frame, so the colours drift as the phone moves; press Lock colours and tap the clear film between two frames to fix it. Capture then takes a full-resolution still and opens it here for cropping, straightening and saving. If you have no light box, press Light box on a second phone or tablet, turn its brightness up and lay the film on it.