Negatiivikuva

Negatiivikuva refers to a photographic negative, which is an image created by developing a photosensitive material, typically film or paper, where the light and dark areas are reversed. In a negative, bright areas of the subject appear dark and shadowy areas appear light. Colors are also inverted, meaning a red object would appear cyan, blue would appear yellow, and green would appear magenta.

Negatives serve as an intermediate step in the traditional photographic process. To create a positive print from a negative, light is shone through the negative onto another piece of photosensitive material, such as photographic paper. This second exposure captures the reversed image and, upon development, produces a positive print where the tones and colors are restored to their original appearance.

Historically, the use of negatives was fundamental to film photography. Photographers would carefully handle and store their negatives, as they were the sole means of producing multiple positive prints of a single image. The quality and preservation of the negative directly impacted the quality of the final print. With the advent of digital photography, the physical negative has largely been superseded, though the concept of a reversed image or a digital negative file still exists in some contexts. The term "negatiivikuva" is Finnish for photographic negative.