Negative Film

There are numerous tricks and techniques people use when making an image of this nature, but I am going to show how I created this image using only the very basic tools.

Using the Polygonal Lasso (P) tool, Rounded Rectangle (U) custom shape tool and the Rectangular Marquee (M) tool to make a strip of 35mm film.

The first thing I needed to do was to assemble the basic structure of the figure. Taking or even deleting segments one by one. Make sure to always follow the curves and contours of the original film like the image below taken from Kodak Gold 200 film in order to help keep the familiar recognizable shape.

Starting with creating the base film, the camera feed holes and the black edges. I will reveal the all Photoshop method here. Open a new document with a white background. Mine is 1700×900 at 70ppi.

Create a new layer and rename it Film. Choose the Rectangular Marquee (M). For now I just want to lay down the basic structure of the figure by pressing the D key to reset the foreground and background colors to black and white, then press Alt-Backspace to fill the selection with black.




Guys... Ofcourse we need the area where the photos will be placed somewhere. 2×3 aspect is good to be a standard frame format for a 35mm camera, isn't. Set the Rectangular Marquee (M) tool and mark the Fixed Aspect Ratio box and set the ratio to 3 Wide and 2 High. Go ahead and drag out the first opening.





By continuing to activate the selection, move your rectangle to the right (to the left by Beyonce, not me... lol) and remove all remaining frames. While holding down the Shift key, drag the selection horizontally or you can move it easily by using the arrow keys on your keyboard. Slow down, dood... :) Don't forget to press Ctrl+D to deselect.




Pick the Rounded Rectangle (U). If you have difficult to see the area of your workflow, you'll gonna like this one... Zoom in on the top left corner of your film by pressing Ctrl-+. Now you might happy enough with the positioning of it.





Click on the Paths tab in the layers palette and click the Convert Path to Selection icon at the bottom of the palette then click back to the Layers tab... or you can simply follow what the image said to you below...




Finish the top of the film, proceed the step until you done with the bottom.





Press the T key to grab the text tool from the Tools bar, set the foreground color to #ddde9e.
Finished??? Double click on the layer name and rename it Top Numbers.





Again, add a new layer below the Top Numbers and name the layer Stripe. Change the Style of your Rectangular Marquee (M) tool back to Normal (unfixed). Create a single stripe like this...





Press Ctrl+D to Deselect, then see carefully what the inset below said to you... (Creating Clipping Mask section).





Turn the opacity of the Stripe layer down to 35%. Back to the Top Numbers layer, duplicate it by pressing Ctrl+J and don't forget to name it Bottom Numbers.







Move fast to the next level. You can add something you like, barcode for example... Anything! Put the Kodak type and Gold type or anything you like.. whatever.. and I don't care about that, lol.

Now we are ready to insert our photos and we need them to be imported beneath the Film layer.
Click and drag the image into your Film by considering that the Move (V) tool selected.





Press Ctrl+T to invoke the Free Transform tool whenever your photo will be too large initially to fit inside. Add more photos as desired exactly the same way.

And voila! Our Negative Film is complete!!!