Originally Posted by
J. Gilbert Plantinga
The bundled film settings for negatives (and they are settings or "Setups" in Flexcolor parlance, not profiles per se) in Flexcolor, at least the ones I've tried, suck so I've always created my own. Bear in mind that to do this right you need to make separate setup files for different kinds of light, sunny, cloudy etc., and you'll still need to do some tweaking to get the color balance right. Color negative is a subjective thing. Here's how to do it: You need three sheets of film and a Gretag color checker or similar target (best not a Kodak gray card, they're not really neutral). Develop one sheet unexposed, shoot one sheet of the target exposed per an incident meter reading, and shoot one sheet of the target overexposed by 6 stops. In Flexcolor choose any color negative setup, expand the histogram window to show all three channels and move the endpoints on each channel to 0 and 255; set all three midpoints to 127. Pre-scan the unexposed sheet and sample the image with the black eyedropper -- this sets your base+fog+orange mask and balances your shadows. Pre scan the overexposed target and sample the white square on the color checker -- this does the same thing for your highlights. Then pre-scan the properly exposed target and set the neutrals with the middle eyedropper on whichever middle gray patch gives the best looking color balance. Finally, open the Setup dialog, check the CC tab and make sure that all of the color corrections and the saturation box are zeroed out, and save your setup. You can also dial in your preferred sharpening and flextouch (if you use it) settings as defaults. Hope this helps.
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