Best tutorial for color negative scanning

[DolphinDan]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for a very informative post on scanning color negatives. 1 question (well maybe 2):

What 9x12 LED Light Table are you using? And which light table would you recommend (assuming 1 or 2 brands are better than the rest) getting for scanning film?

Namaste
Daniel

[Rich14]

Dan,

Here's what I'm using:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Rich

[DolphinDan]

Thanks Rich.

Daniel

[SergeyT]

Great addition Rich.
I use DSLR as my light meter and keep the "measurement" JPEGs as a color reference that helps me to quickly color-correct my scans.

[aluncrockford]

I came across this very simple action and it works for me,

https://www.iamthejeff.com/post/32/t...ive-film-scans

I scan as a positive open the file and use the action, for me its quick and easy, and once you have the base correction you can tweak to your hearts content

[hoffy]

Well, I never...... If it works as advertised, that should be a nice easy way to get images online ready (at least).

But, it's not perfect. One of the displayed images has a green cast on the grey's and another is a bit odd on the green grass, but it seems like a very quick starting point (which is where I tend to have most drama's).

Regardless, thanks for posting it!

[1erCru]

is there any point in scanning at 600DPI? Silverfast has a typesetter ( 600 ) DPI setting and I wasn't sure if this setting just spits out a bunch of interpolated data.

[Pere Casals]

is there any point in scanning at 600DPI? Silverfast has a typesetter ( 600 ) DPI setting and I wasn't sure if this setting just spits out a bunch of interpolated data.

It is binned data, not interpolated.

It can make sense, of course. A 4x5 negative at 600 dpi will deliver a 2400x3000 image, same than a 4k tv can show, and 4x what a Full HD TV has.

If negative is 8x10... imagine...

Just scan and see

[Corran]

https://www.iamthejeff.com/post/32/t...ive-film-scans

Out of curiosity I tried this. Tonight I found some old color negatives from years ago and put them on the scanner. The automatic process made the shadows green and emaciated. With a bit of tweaking with Photoshop's "Auto" commands it became acceptable. However, using the basic raw scan and a simple inversion + the same "Auto" commands plus a tiny tweak with curves did the same thing. There's a slight difference in the highlights, with the auto process having a bit of a yellow tinge I think. Here's my results:



It's true that the blue channel can be rough with color negs, due to the orange mask, but Photoshop's "Auto" commands can generally sort it out. However, one thing to note is the "Auto Color" clip settings. In Photoshop's Curves or Levels dialog box, click "options" and you will see on the bottom the options pertaining to clip percentage. I set the shadows to clip a bit and the highlights to clip a tiny amount. You can tweak this to however you want. Sometimes I keep the highlight clippage at 0. Here's what that box looks like:



You can change this whenever you want. You might want to clip more on certain negatives. I do more tweaking though with curves once getting the colors in the ballpark. But don't discount the auto commands - they work very well for color neg. Honestly this reminds me that I need to try some different things in that dialog box to see if I can get even closer to good results without fuss.

Personally I struggle most with color neg film that is outdated. Some fog and color crossover and suddenly the negative is a mess.

[chassis]

Bryan,

Interesting, thanks for posting. Do you mind sharing the technical information (film size and emulsion, scanner type, scanner software)? My recent work with Portra 400 and Ektar 100 in 120 and 4x5 have taught me that the sensitivity needs to be nearly fully used, of an Epson V7xx with Epson Scan. Ken Lee's black and white scanning tutorial addresses this, with global "value" settings. With color negative, this needs to be done for each color channel. Also, I find that the gamma needs to be tweaked to get as much information out of the shadows as possible, for each color channel. I have scanned negatives and experienced clipped shadows, when the histogram on Epson Scan suggested all of the information has been captured. When I lowered the input sensitivity slider to nearly zero, all shadow detail was retained without clipping.

The result of using nearly the entire 0-255 input spectrum for each channel means in postprocessing all colors are fully represented in their histograms, with room to spare on both sides of the histogram.