Turning A Negative...Into A Positive

I work in our basement. There's a lot of things in our basement, food storage, Christmas decorations, camping equipment...

And old photos.

I've got my old photos, old missionary photos, and photos of my own family, wife, kids. The other day I ran across some old negatives. They weren't slides--they were larger than that, and I couldn't tell who was in the pictures because they were negatives. But, because I figured out a way to take pictures of slides using my phone and my iPad, I thought I'd try and turn these negatives into positives.

First, I fired up the iPad with a white background and pumped up the brightness to full. Then, I put down the negatives and placed a clear piece of glass over them so the corners did not lift off the iPad. I thought it would be no problem switching the negative images once I got them on my computer. 

Nope.

Turns out the Mac's photo program does not have that option. 

So, I did a little research. Turns out I can change everything on my iPhone by inverting all screens. Great, I thought. I'll just invert the images, pull up the pictures, take a screenshot of the photos--now, the photos will no longer be negatives--and I'll have fixed it.

Nope.

Turns out, when you take a screenshot of an inverted picture, the phone will copy it correctly, but when you turn off the inverted function, it changes the screenshot photo back to its original...negative.

I can get around it. I can invert the photos on my iPad, then take individual pictures using my phone. Or, I could buy Photoshop and have it do the switch for me. Since I'm cheap, I'll probably do the former and not the latter. There's some great pictures in the negatives, most of them are of my mom and her friends. It's highly likely those friends, like my mom, have passed on. We my never know who's in the photos. Such is life. Still, it'll be fun to see them anyway...

As long as they can be positive.