Or were some form of digital scanners always in use?
In: 4
They weren’t. Prior to scanners, negatives needed to be printed (on metal, glass, or paper) to be seen in positive.
They were chemically inverted, onto contact prints (paper) or film strips. Actually, there isn’t a high need to invert them for photographer use. People who work with film can learn the things they need to know in negative, they simply get used to it. You only need prints or filmstrips when working with non-photographers like ad agency types.
Simple way is to take a negative of a negative. Prints essentially work this way.
However, some film types use a chemical process to remove the exposed film. The remaining film can then be exposed leaving a positive image.
One guy already answered the main part of your question. But the other part was if you wanted to display a picture using negatives you could always push light through and display onto an angled mirror to a projector screen. It was possible to enlarge this way and show the photos prior to printing them all if you were trying to only pick the best photos and save paper by not printing (or…developing) every one.
By using an enlarger. The enlarger projects the negative at the desired size onto a piece of light-sensitive paper. The dark areas on the negative (which are the areas of higher exposure) block the light from the enlarger lamp, and the light areas on the negative allow the light through, which develops that part of the photo paper. Then you simply place the paper in the developer bath for the desired amount of time and then the stop bath and the fixer, and the result is a positive photo print. Analog film is still developed this way.
Quite simply, they weren’t. Negatives were put between a light source and photographic paper. When exposed to light, and then chemically processed, areas of the paper that were exposed to light turned dark, while unexposed areas remained light. Intensity of the darkness depends on exposure time.
So a dark shadow in real-life, appears white (transparent) in the negative, but admits the passage of light which exposes the dark shadow in the final photograph.
Through the 70’s onwards, there were two main types of film used in photography.
Positive or slide film used a process that created an image on the film of the correct colours – this meant by shining a light through the slide directly you could project a large copy of the image onto a screen.
Negative or print film used a process that created an image on the film with the colours reversed – either a traditional black and white film, or a colour version. The traditional way of printing these uses an enlarger to project the image onto a piece of light sensitive paper, which also used a process that created a negative copy of your image. With photography if you make a negative copy of an image that is already a negative, you end up with a positive final image.
It is also worth mentioning that digital printing technology had been available since long before digital cameras were a household item – larger lab grade optical scanners were used to scan film onto a computer, which could then be printed onto photo paper using and automated printer – this works using a similar process to traditional photo printing, but instead of projecting the image directly from the film, a laser is used to draw the image on a light sensitive paper which was then processed in the appropriate chemicals to create the final photo – this printing system is why photos have always had such a distinctive look and feel to them, very different to the output from a typical computer printer.
Latest Answers