Negativabdruck

Negativabdruck, also known as a "negative impression" in English, refers to a photographic or artistic technique where the resulting image is a reversal of the original tones. In a negativabdruck, light areas of the subject appear dark in the image, and dark areas appear light. This is essentially the direct output of a photographic negative before it is printed to a positive.

Historically, this technique was most commonly encountered with analog photography. When a film negative was developed, it was a negativabdruck. To obtain a positive image, light was shone through the negative onto photographic paper, which was then developed to produce a print with corrected tones.

In digital photography and image editing, a negativabdruck can be created through software manipulation. This is often achieved by inverting the color channels or applying specific filters that reverse the luminance values of the pixels. While not a standard display format, it can be used for artistic effect or to illustrate specific concepts related to image processing. The term is also used in lithography and other printmaking processes to describe a print that has reversed tones.