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Negative Converter · Film conversion & restoration for Mac OS
Forty years of family film, waiting in a shoebox. Bring it back to life.
Negative Converter turns scanned black-and-white and color negatives into finished photographs. Not with a simple color flip: its engine works in optical density, the way film records light, and is tuned against hand-corrected reference conversions. It is honest enough to keep the warmth of the light that was really there. A complete darkroom of its own, no Lightroom, no plugin, no subscription.
In development · Coming to the Mac App Store
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Family negatives from 25 years ago, brought back.
Each picture is Negative Converter's split view: on the left, the converted photograph; on the right, the color negative it came from.
The conversion
A convincing positive begins with the character of the film.
Color negative film hides its picture behind an orange mask, crossed dye layers, and a density curve made for printing paper, not for a screen. Negative Converter measures each scan's own densities, removes the orange mask channel by channel, and maps density to a positive through a print-style response curve. It is tuned against hand-corrected reference conversions, not a generic inversion.
Color balance comes from the scan itself. The engine neutralizes from the image's own gray evidence, and face detection on your Mac anchors skin tones toward natural values. It deliberately does not scrub every frame to gray, a warm room stays warm, and evening light stays evening light.
Film type is detected frame by frame, so a folder that mixes black-and-white and color scans converts as it should. When the evidence is too thin to decide, it says Uncertain and waits for you to choose, rather than guess. Pick one of three conversion responses, Neutral, Warm Lab, or Clean Lab, and use Pre-Saturation to adjust color separation in the negative itself, which helps faded film.
One film base for a whole roll. The automatic measurement works frame by frame. When a roll should look like one roll, measure its clear film base once and use it everywhere.
Save it by name
Keep the base under a name you choose, ready for the next frames from the same roll. Rename or delete it whenever you like.
Apply it to the roll
Tick frames in a checklist, Shift-click for a range, and apply in one step. One ⌘Z undoes it all. Each frame keeps its own anchor, so the roll becomes more consistent, not identical.
The darkroom
Refine like a printer, not like a spreadsheet.
Auto-conversion gets each frame most of the way; the darkroom takes it the rest. Tone from black point to highlights, plus a tone curve for luminance and each color channel. White balance with an eyedropper, temperature, tint, and per-channel color. Texture, Clarity, Dehaze, Vibrance, and Saturation. Color grading wheels for shadows, midtones, highlights, and the whole image.
Black-and-white frames get a purely tonal darkroom, with no color controls to tint them by accident. Crop to exact ratios and straighten up to 45°; the crop stays inside the picture, so an export never has blank corners. Every slider follows your hand on a fast preview, and the full-quality render settles in as soon as you pause.
Restoration
Decades-old dust, healed with the film's own grain, or by a model that lives on your Mac.
Film that has waited forty years in a shoebox arrives with dust, scratches, and blemishes in almost every scan. Paint over them with the heal brush. It first copies a matching patch of real grain from beside the blemish; where none fits, a machine-learning model on your Mac fills the stroke. Choose Modeled to send every stroke to the model instead, and color and black-and-white film each keep their own choice. Zoom to 2×, 4×, or 8× to work grain by grain; every stroke is its own undo. Nothing is uploaded. Below: a real blemish on forty-year-old film, and the same spot one brush stroke later.
Denoise uses a real-image denoising model, with a Chroma only mode that removes color noise and keeps the film grain, because grain is the photograph. A 1:1 detail view, right in the side panel, shows the result at full resolution, so you judge it on the detail that matters, like an eye or a texture, before you click OK.
Masks
Adjust one part of the picture and leave the rest alone.
A mask limits an adjustment to part of the photograph. Let Negative Converter find the subject, the sky, or a person, or draw the area yourself. Then combine pieces until the mask covers exactly what you mean.
Found for you
- Subject and Background
- People, the whole person, or just their hair, facial skin, body skin, or clothes
- Objects, click the one you want
- Sky, water, land, vegetation, and buildings
- When nothing is found, it says so ("No sky was found") instead of quietly masking the whole frame
Drawn by you
- Brush with eraser, feather, and intensity
- Linear and radial gradients
- Luminance range, a band of brightness
- Color range on color film, a set of colors
- Range masks sample the inside of rectangles you draw: as many as you need, each one movable
Combined and adjusted
- Add, Intersect, Exclude, so a mask can be the sky, under a gradient, minus the person
- Invert, duplicate, and rename any mask
- See it as a red overlay or a black-and-white map
- Each mask gets its own tone, tone curve, and presence
- On color film, its own color, white balance, and color grading too
Output
Preview fast. Export perfectly.
Editing happens on a fast preview. Every export re-reads the original scan and re-runs the whole conversion at full resolution through a 16-bit, color-managed pipeline, never from a preview bitmap. Every recipe records the engine version that made it.
16-bit TIFF
A full-resolution, lossless archival master with an embedded ICC profile, the file you keep.
DNG
A full-size 16-bit linear positive in a DNG file: the finished picture, not camera RAW.
JPEG for sharing
Full-size or resized 8-bit copies at the quality you choose, 92 to start, up to 100.
Any size, never enlarged
Original, Large, Medium, Small, or a long edge you type, from 512 to 16,384 pixels. It never upscales.
Carried forward
Your scan's EXIF and TIFF metadata carry over, and every export is marked upright. DNG also carries camera, lens, date, exposure, author, copyright, and GPS.
Settings sidecar
Every conversion decision, written as readable data beside batch exports and Open Positive files, a record of exactly how each frame was made.
Whole rolls
Made for a roll at a time, not one frame at a time.
Drag in scans or a folder (its top level), or choose File ▸ Open. Every file gets its own row in the queue, a RAW and its JPEG make two rows. The queue and every recipe are waiting when you reopen the app.
Work across the roll
- Copy Settings from one frame, then Paste Settings onto every selected frame in one undo step
- The paste leaves each frame's own masks, healing, crop, and film base alone
- Rotate a whole selection in quarter turns
- Undo reaches back 200 steps, even a frame removed from the queue
Export the lot
- One Export Items… dialog (⌘E) with a checklist of frames
- A naming pattern built from name, counter, and date, with a live preview of the first and last file names
- Batches never overwrite: a clashing name counts up instead
- Progress file by file; one failure never stops the run, and every failure is listed at the end
Hand off and bring in
- Open Positive renders a fresh full-resolution 16-bit TIFF and opens it in your default image app
- Open Positive With… sends it to any editor you choose
- Choose Open With ▸ Negative Converter in the Finder, or drop files on its Dock icon
- PhotoLibrarian, coming soon, spots likely film negatives in your library; right-click one and choose Open in NegativeConverter
Privacy & ownership
Your film stays on your Mac, and your files stay yours.
We believe your data should stay your data, on your own machines, yours to work with any way you want, in any software you want. Negative Converter is built that way.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No network access, macOS itself blocks it from connecting to the internet. No account, no sign-in, no analytics.
Every model runs here
Every machine-learning model runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is shared, and no model is ever downloaded.
Open them anywhere
Your positives are ordinary TIFF, DNG, and JPEG files. Open them in any software you like.
A scan stored only in iCloud or Dropbox shows as Online only and is never downloaded behind your back. Download it in the Finder, add it to the queue again, and it converts like any other.
The negative scan is never rewritten.
Your scan is the artifact, the closest thing to the original negative you'll ever have in a file. Negative Converter reads it and renders from it. Everything it makes is written as a separate file, and it refuses to write over any scan in its queue. Nothing you do in the app can damage it.
Under the hood
Built native, measured honestly.
- Requires A Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 15.6 or later
- Purchase One-time purchase, no subscription. No Lightroom needed
- Input Camera RAW from Nikon, Sony, Canon, and Fujifilm (NEF, ARW, CR2, CR3, RAF) and DNG, decoded by macOS, plus TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and HEIC scans. Tested on 45.7-megapixel frames. A few files from supported cameras can't be decoded by macOS
- RAW handling Decoded without the camera's own look, the same way every time
- Output 16-bit and floating-point conversion; 16-bit TIFF and DNG masters; 8-bit JPEG; GPU-accelerated rendering
- ML models Bundled in the app or built into macOS. Every one runs on your Mac, and none is downloaded
- Apple silicon Healing and denoise run on the GPU, scene recognition can use the Neural Engine, and every render is GPU-accelerated
- Reproducibility Every recipe records its engine version. With the same version of Negative Converter, on the same Mac and macOS version, the same scan and recipe render the same picture
- Help Built in, illustrated, and searchable, with lessons on real photographs
- Text size Four sizes, Small to Extra Large, for text and controls throughout the app; Help has its own size slider
Questions
Converting film negatives on a Mac: short answers.
What is Negative Converter?
A native Mac app that converts scanned film negatives, black-and-white and color, into finished photographs. It heals dust, reduces noise, adjusts parts of a picture with masks, and saves 16-bit TIFF and DNG masters. It is a complete darkroom of its own.
Do I need Lightroom or Photoshop?
No. Negative Converter is a standalone app, not a plugin, and it needs no subscription. Your positives are ordinary TIFF, DNG, and JPEG files, so you can open them in any software you like.
Is Negative Converter an alternative to Negative Lab Pro?
Yes. Negative Lab Pro is a plugin: it works inside Adobe Lightroom Classic, which Adobe sells by subscription. Negative Converter is a Mac app of its own, bought once, with no Lightroom and no subscription. It opens camera RAW and film-scanner scans directly, converts a whole roll from one film-base measurement, and saves 16-bit TIFF and DNG masters you can open in Lightroom, Photoshop, or any editor you like.
Does it work with camera scans and film-scanner scans?
Yes. If you photograph your negatives with a camera, it opens RAW files from Nikon, Sony, Canon, and Fujifilm (NEF, ARW, CR2, CR3, RAF), plus DNG. If you use a film scanner or a flatbed, it opens scans saved as TIFF, JPEG, PNG, or HEIC. macOS decodes the RAW files, and it can't read a few files from supported cameras.
Can it convert a whole roll at once?
Yes. Measure a roll's clear film base once and apply it to every frame you tick. Copy one frame's settings and paste them onto every selected frame in one step; each frame keeps its own masks, healing, and crop. Then one Export Items… dialog exports the frames you check, named by a pattern you choose, and a batch never overwrites a file.
Does my film leave my Mac?
No. Negative Converter has no network access, macOS itself blocks it from connecting to the internet. Every machine-learning model, healing and denoise included, runs on your Mac, and none is downloaded. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is shared, and there is no account.
Will it change my original scans?
Never. It reads your scan and renders from it. Edits are saved as recipes, everything it makes is a separate file, and it refuses to write over any scan in its queue.
What Mac do I need?
A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 15.6 or later.
Where can I buy it?
Negative Converter is coming to the Mac App Store as a one-time purchase, with no subscription. To hear the day it ships, email info@archiveoptics.com.
And when the roll is converted?
PhotoLibrarian, coming soon, keeps your positives organized with the rest of your photographs. It can also spot the film negatives already in your library and send any one here with a right-click.