Today's Retrofuturism is the fusion of photographic film and a webcam to create a realtime negative viewer.
Inspired by K Lars Lohn on Mastodon, I have been culling physical media.
Positive images like slides and prints are easy to sort through. Negative images aren't quite as easy. Because scanning takes a minute or more per frame, I didn't want to do that to every frame. A negative viewer like the xray viewers in cartoons would have been wonderful. So I created one.
I turned to OpenCV and Python to write a basic realtime negative viewer using a webcam, a cheap lightbox, and a script.
It turned out to be as simple as installing cv2 and a few lines of code.
pip install opencv-python
And this little script:
import cv2
window = 'Negative Viewer'
device = 0
cv2.namedWindow(window)
cap = cv2.VideoCapture(device)
while True:
ret, frame = cap.read()
if not ret:
break
cv2.imshow(window, cv2.bitwise_not(frame))
# Break the loop if 'q' is pressed
key_code = cv2.waitKey(1)
key = bytes([key_code & 0xff]).decode(errors='ignore')
if key in ('q', 'Q'):
break
Enjoy.