A positive image is a normal image. A negative image is a total inversion of a positive image, in which light areas appear dark and vice versa. A negative color image is additionally color reversed, with red areas appearing cyan, greens appearing magenta and blues appearing yellow. This sometimes can have a reverse effect and cause the greens to appear a reddish brown.
Film negatives usually also have much less contrast than the final images. This is compensated by the higher contrast reproduction by photographic paper or by increasing the contrast when scanning and post processing the scanned images.
Read more about this topic: Negative (photography)
Famous quotes containing the words negative and/or image:
“The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short- cut answer.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)