Hello everybody!
I have a question that has been my nightmare for some weeks now and, personally, I cannot find an answer...
The question is, as you can imagine, what's the real color of a negative image?
The problem, I guess, arise as there is this orange mask that is different, from what I have understood, for all the different film and I guess it could also change upon how well you have developed the film.
Personally I have developed 32 4x5 negatives for a project I am carrying on and, even if I I checked the temperature and times like never before during the developing of the films itself (with a Jobo CCP-2) when I scan it (Epson V750 plus Silverfast 8 calibrated with IT8) I get slightly different colors for each sheet of film. I don't understand if it is a problem of the film or a problem of the software...
This is driving me crazy...
Sometimes I read some topics where people debate on which should be the colors for some films and which should be not but the question I always ask myself is:
- 1 when you printed the negatives traditionally the final color of the print was not influenced by the printing process and materials?
- 2 Shouldn't we therefore accept different looks for the very same piece of film scanned in different ways?
If I am wrong and there is a true set of colors for each type of film how can we know we have scanned it correctly?
For example, sometimes, if I am not 100% sure about the scan of a B&W piece of film I scan it as a positive image and the I reverse it setting the white point on the markers on the film and the black one on the lateral stripes. But for negatives how do you do this? I've only ended up with very bad images when trying to apply this method to color negatives.
Thank you very much for your help!
Alessandro
PS: As I guess the topic might lead to some very complicated discussions, and I am not a color technician, I would really appreciate if everybody could keep a simple vocaboulary or, at least, explain the meaning of the super difficult words used.
Thank you!
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