Working with cleaned-up negatives

[Rex176]

Hi folks,

Relatively new to the LF thing. Just finished my first 50 sheet box of Fomapan 100 using an Intrepid 4x5 Mark IV.

I have a question about workflow, specifically regarding handling of cleaned-up negatives.

I'm using Capture One for post-processing. (This is slightly relevant to this discussion.)

After I've scanned a negative as a TIFF, I usually have to spend a lot of time cleaning up the image: dust, fuzz, etc. (I really have to be more diligent about keeping film holders and scanner clean.)

Once the negative is cleaned up, I'll start working on it. A couple of times, however, I've shot myself in the foot by hitting "undo" too many times or hitting "reset image" and I am back at my original image with all the spots. Depending on exactly what I've done, in Capture One there is no way to get back to the cleaned-up image.

So, as a precaution, once I've cleaned up an image, I export it as a TIFF file, so that I've always got a backup of my cleaned-up images, and I can reimport if necessary.

That got me thinking: Maybe as a matter of course I should reimport the cleaned-up TIFF into Capture One and then use that as my starting point for further post-processing. I can see a few advantages to doing this. If I decide to "start again" with my edits, I can reset the image and I've still got all the clean-up work done. Also, the image doesn't have the healing layers from the clean-up process.

Obviously, I'd be using more disk space, but I don't care about that.

Does this make sense?

Am I possibly losing something in the image by exporting and reimporting it?

Thanks for any thoughts.

[Tin Can]

I quit all that nonsense some time ago

it will drive you nuts chasing by nothing

Oh, welcome to LFPF!

[Jim Noel]

I quit all that nonsense some time ago

it will drive you nuts chasing by nothing

Oh, welcome to LFPF!

Me too!

[Larry Gebhardt]

Hi folks,

Relatively new to the LF thing. Just finished my first 50 sheet box of Fomapan 100 using an Intrepid 4x5 Mark IV.

I have a question about workflow, specifically regarding handling of cleaned-up negatives.

I'm using Capture One for post-processing. (This is slightly relevant to this discussion.)

After I've scanned a negative as a TIFF, I usually have to spend a lot of time cleaning up the image: dust, fuzz, etc. (I really have to be more diligent about keeping film holders and scanner clean.)

Once the negative is cleaned up, I'll start working on it. A couple of times, however, I've shot myself in the foot by hitting "undo" too many times or hitting "reset image" and I am back at my original image with all the spots. Depending on exactly what I've done, in Capture One there is no way to get back to the cleaned-up image.

So, as a precaution, once I've cleaned up an image, I export it as a TIFF file, so that I've always got a backup of my cleaned-up images, and I can reimport if necessary.

That got me thinking: Maybe as a matter of course I should reimport the cleaned-up TIFF into Capture One and then use that as my starting point for further post-processing. I can see a few advantages to doing this. If I decide to "start again" with my edits, I can reset the image and I've still got all the clean-up work done. Also, the image doesn't have the healing layers from the clean-up process.

Obviously, I'd be using more disk space, but I don't care about that.

Does this make sense?

Am I possibly losing something in the image by exporting and reimporting it?

Thanks for any thoughts.

You can make edits to standard tiff files multiple times without a quality loss, unless you use jpeg compression in the tiff (that’s not common).

I use photoshop to clean up scans. I do the spotting into a separate layer. If the file is too big it must be saved as a psb, in which case I also export a flattened version as a tiff. That tiff is all I need most of the time. I forget how capture one works, but I think all the edits are in a sidecar file, which can be backed up. So that’s another possibility if you want to save disk space.

[Larry Gebhardt]

I quit all that nonsense some time ago

it will drive you nuts chasing by nothing

Oh, welcome to LFPF!

It may not drive everybody nuts. We are not all alike, and some of us like both sets of tools.