If you were shooting back in the film days, you probably have a stockpile of film negatives sitting in a shoebox somewhere. Here's a quick tip on how to convert a scanned negative into a positive image in Lightroom. Regardless of how you digitize your negatives, whether you use a scanner or you set up a camera with a macro lens, illuminating the film with a light box of some kind, you'll ideally want the digitized image to be in RAW format. That way, you'll have more flexibility in post-processing compared to using a JPEG image.
The steps are fairly easy. If you use software other than Lightroom to process your images, you should be able to use a similar process in many other popular software applications. In Lightroom, you'll need to be in the Develop module. Within the Tone Curve panel, click the "curve" image in the bottom right corner of the panel to turn on Tone Curve editing. The tone curve will then have points in the bottom left and top right corners of the histogram box. Drag the point in the bottom left corner to the top left corner, and then drag the point in the top right corner to the bottom right corner. That's all there is to it. Once you do that, you can save it as a preset so that it's a one click process for any negatives that you want to convert in the future. When creating the preset, you'll only want the Tone Curve and Process Version tickboxes selected.
You'll now have a positive image that you can post-process to your heart's content, whether you do none and stay true to the colours from the film, or edit is as you would with any other digital images.