Program item

Archiving 2025

Archival Negatives: A Novel Toolkit for Historically-accurate Inversions

SC09

NEW Archival Negatives: A Novel Toolkit for Historically-accurate Inversions
Instructor(s): Alice Plutino and Luca Armellin, Imageese
Level: Overview
Duration: 2 hours
Course Time: 14:15-16:15

Benefits
This course enables the attendee to:
- Overview of Analog Inversion Systems: Understand the historical methods and techniques used for analog color and tone inversion in photographic and cinematographic workflows.
- Inversion Systems in Photography and Cinema: Explore the systems and processes tailored for color inversion in both photographic negatives and motion picture films.
- Scan and Inversion Workflow: Learn the complete workflow for scanning archival negatives and applying accurate inversion techniques to achieve high-quality results.
- Toolkit Demonstration: Gain hands-on experience with the novel inversion toolkit, applied to archival negative scans.
- Comparison with Other Methods: Analyze and compare the toolkit's performance against traditional and modern inversion methods to evaluate its strengths and applications.

Course Description
What if we are doing film negative inversions wrong? In this course, you will have an overview of alternative and historically accurate color inversion techniques. We will present an overview of analog inversion systems and their application in photography and cinema. The course features a live demonstration of high-quality film scanning followed by the application of a novel toolkit to invert negatives, alongside a detailed exploration of workflows that combine scanning precision with inversion accuracy. Learn to compare and evaluate traditional and modern inversion methods and discover how to apply these techniques to preserve and digitize historical materials with fidelity. Ideal for professionals and enthusiasts in archival restoration, this course bridges the gap between analog heritage and digital innovation.

Intended Audience: Students and professionals of any field, from physics to archiving, image scientist and archivists.

Alice Plutino is MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam and PhD in Computer Science (Università degli studi di Università degli Studi di Milano, 2021). Her research interests are Color Science, Image Enhancement, Digitization, and Archiving, with a particular interest in Cultural Heritage applications. She is the author of several journal and conference papers of national and international relevance. She is an Adjunct Professor at Università degli Studi di Milano and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, teaching digital film restoration and digital media conservation. She is vice-president and treasurer of the Italian color group (Gruppo del Colore), deputy editor of the Color Culture and Science Journal (CCSJ), vice-coordinator of Division 1, and coordinator of Division 8 of NC CIE Italy.

Luca Armellin is currently a master’s degree student in Computer Science at the University of Milano (Italy), an IT sysadmin and software developer. His research interests mainly focus on Vision Impairments with particular attention to Color Vision Deficiencies Colorimetry and Color Science; Image Processing and Computer Vision focused on film digitization. Formerly he co-founded and worked as a technician and software developer in a laboratory for photographic film processing and digitization in Milan.