I have recently found a convenient  way to make contact sheets without using any paper or costly materials. Here is all you need.

• negative • light box • digital camera • tripod • Photoshop

First, set up your tripod to look directly over your light box, and make sure all of the light box fills the frame. I recommend that you use a 50m lens for full frame cameras and about a 75mm for cameras with a 1.6 cropped sensor. I also recommend that you shoot high quality camera raw, and for colour negative, adjust the white balance so the negative is less orange.

After this, make a few test shots to see what exposure your negatives look good at. Once you have found a middle ground exposure, set your camera to about 1.5 stop bracketing (this will give 3 images at various exposures and will let you see any under or over exposed images.)

Once you have set up, make sure you turn any ambient light sources off and start shooting. It took me about an hour to photograph 130 negatives. Once you have finished, transfer your images to your computer and open them up in Photoshop. There are many ways to work quickly in Photoshop, such as using ‘actions’ or even running a script to automatically invert and save your images as TIFFs. I won’t go too into detail about it, so all you have to know is you must now invert your images and save them out to TIFF.

Congratulations, you can now see all your negatives on your computer……but that’s not the end of it. I have found that camera raw is a very good program to use for cropping and adding subtle alterations using curves. The best thing is that you can copy and paste development settings, so you only have to edit one of your bracketed images for each image. You can then just copy and paste the settings. Colour negative is a little trickier, and will never deliver the true colour of what a print would look like. Still it is useful to get an idea of composition and a rough look at the colours. I recommend changing the colour temperature in camera raw.

Once you have adjusted and cropped all your images, simply export them as jpegs and upload them to any tablet device. You can now check what prints you want to print whilst on the move. Having your contacts on your computer also enables you to experiment with cropping and contrast, giving you a fast and flexible look at what your print could look like. Obviously a real contact print is much better quality and truer to an actual print, but I still think this method will save you money and time. 

Simplified list

•    Set up your tripod over your light box

•    Alter your camera settings and turn on bracketing

•    Shoot photos and upload them

•    Invert your  images in Photoshop and save them as TIFF

•    Alter levels / convert to B&W / alter colour temperature.

•    Export your images as Jpegs and upload them to your device.