André Eikmeyer is the creator of the Negsets and Negmaster tools.

by Christopher Osborne.

André Eikmeyer is a portrait photographer, videographer, and media designer. He is also the creator of the Negsets and Negmaster tools for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

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André Eikmeyer is a portrait photographer, videographer, and media designer. He is also the creator of the Negsets and Negmaster tools for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

André’s journey from photographer to software designer was an accidental one. He dusted off his Pentax 67 and started using it for portrait work, thus re-joining the community of analogue photographers two years ago. “The analogue process forces me to take better photographs. And better pictures sell better. I find that analogue photography slows me down. It makes me more serious. I feel more like a photographer. And this changes how my sitters react as well. Putting an analogue camera in the room somehow makes the process serious”. And this is also true for videography. Working in analogue demands a much higher level of concentration.

Then André ran into a problem. He digitally “scanned” images using his Canon 6D but was struggling to achieve correct colours in Lightroom and Photoshop. He describes the digitally converted results as “too scientific, and not emotional. There was too much resolution, the colour separation was too hard, and the results were too analytical”. To André’s taste, this was making people look worse than in real life.

It became apparent that the adobe colour profiles were designed for digital cameras, but the white balance wasn’t quite working correctly in interpreting the results for analogue photography. Reds were becoming magenta, and blues were shifting towards cyan. In general, André had found that when a digitally captured negative was inverted there was a shift towards a more tungsten white balance.

He started researching how to correct this and without realising it was disappearing deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole. He started work on an early version of Negmaster. He replaced the Kaiser LED light table with a homebuilt light source made with xenon light bulbs from cars. The colours became closer, but still were not quite right.

Eventually he bought a mediocre Plustek scanner, and “noticed an immediate improvement” in the colours. This may in part be a reflection on the R&D effort that scanner manufacturers have spent on product design. And it could also be a reflection on the bayer filter system used in digital camera sensors. These have twice as many green sensors as blue and red, with intermediate colours being derived by software interpolation.

Negsets is a Lightroom addon which is designed to allow photographers to take a flat image and use sliders to adjust the colour to taste. Negmaster is a tool for Photoshop and is used for the final “polish”. There is an automatic feature, but André encourages his users to take control in order to achieve the best possible results.

André receives several enquiries a day from people who would like a free trial version. Instead, he prefers to offer a week of intensive support and a money back guarantee. He provides support through a dedicated Facebook group, and this is transforming into a complete support ecosystem.

That said, André’s dedication to providing a complete solution of software tool and enthusiastic personal training support is admirable. There can’t be many software companies which provide personal support from an accomplished photographer. And this is paying dividends. One local user recently posted “I have been using Negmaster for half a year and my results are absolutely stunning”.

André laughs. “You know the guy at the gas station polishing your windows? That is me”!

You can contact André Eikmeyer at Andre@negmaster.com and visit the Negmaster community on Facebook at @negmasterofficial. You can also see André’s work at https://Andreeikmeyer.de/

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