Color negs, scanning, and great new software!

[Terence Patrick]

I tend to shoot color negative and scan into my computer to make everything digital. One problem I've always had was in the color correction phase, I could never get things to either pop the way I like or simply get accurate colors. I recently came across PictoColor's inCamera v4, a plug-in for Photoshop that corrects color based on shooting a sample shot of the GretagMacbeth ColorChecker.

Well, a few of you may say this has been around for a while, big deal. Well, every time I was using this plug-in, my images were really flat looking and even with a bunch of Photoshop work, I was still having problems getting images to look good. Then along came Adobe Lightroom, which I've been toying around with for my digital files. If you import the TIFF files from the scanned images, LR can tweak the image the same way it works on RAW files, giving you control over white balance, fill light, and hue/sat/lum in ways that don't end up in posterization (which was happening when I was using straight Photoshop).

Anyone else try this out? It's been working great for me.

[PViapiano]

Terence...

Thanks for the tip...I'll have to download the beta of Lightroom and check it out on some troublesome Portra negs (med format) I shot a few months ago.

[archivue]

PictoColor's inCamera v4 is just a color calibration toll such as Monaco EZ color... it have nothing to do with color neg scans... as far as i know, the calibration in scanner is only use for transparencies and prints, not for negs...

[Terence Patrick]

Archivue,

I've got Monaco EZ Color and it does not function in the same way as inCamera. inCamera is primarily used to profile images based on the GretagMacbeth ColorChecker chart that was photographed in an image.