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Convert colour negatives

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Martin Klöckner says:

Hi analogos!

Maybe this topic is allready answered somewhere but i could not find the answer so far :-)

To digitize my negatives i use a Fuji Digicam with macro optics. This works fine for everything which is b/w. Since i shoot sometimes in colours as well i started to do the same thing with the colour negatives. But I'm struggling with the convertion then. I'm using LR CC on Windows and on Android.
The problem is that I'm not able to get the colours right while I'm converting from neg. to pos. The white balance is not the big topic but the resulting pictures looks always to blueisch to me :-/

Are there any hints, tipps, suggetions to get a good starting point for the further processing? Or is there an easy software tool which does the job?

Cheers
Martin
1:41AM, 27 September 2019 PDT (permalink)

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Thomas Ale says:

I can recommend this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsJPeSiSTtg
58 months ago (permalink)

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Martin Klöckner says:

Thomas Ale:

Hi Thomas!

Thanks, I'll have a look to it after work :-)
58 months ago (permalink)

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ilya95 says:

Hi, You'll need PS,PSE or Gimp. LR is not enough.

To get colors from scanned negatives right you will basically need to follow these simple steps:

1. When scanning, make sure black is not clopped and white is moderately clipped (this will require to control frame cropping, to make sure black frame is not scanned)
2. open in PS, PSE or Gimp, manually adjust black level for R,G,B channels, using "adjust levels" (if black frame is not scanned it is easy to do...). Black point is usually off and different for color channels, due to different average density.
3. Find neutral patch and use middle pipette (in adjust levels) to make grey-grey, or move middle cursor in "adjust levels" control (it will essentially change gamma in corresponding color channels). As you set black in previous step, it will remain black in this step. Usually at this point you will get very reasonable colors.
4. Adjust white clipping to taste, sometimes extra clipping makes white whiter.
5. Open in LR to adjust cast, temperature, saturation, vibrance, etc... Do not forget sharpening...
6. You can save your image as DNG, it will keep all your LR adjustments remembered without changing data in image file. Also, DNG will be 30% smaller, due to lossless compression.

- Adjustments in LR only may not be sufficient, because they not allow you to align black gamma and white points per color channel, and this is required when you scanning film.
58 months ago (permalink)

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Martin Klöckner says:

ilya95:

Thanks for this feedback! I'll try it when i work next with color negatives. The last series i did only in b/w since this is much easier and i like the results much more then the ones i could achieve with colour negatives. But maybe your hints will help. :-)
58 months ago (permalink)

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liattbaifosafsn says:

Since not all color images contain a shade of neutral gray it may be helpful to shoot a gray card in direct sunlight for each color negative film type that you use. Then use photoshop/gimp to set the gray point in levels/curves on that, then save the settings that it chooses. If you want very accurate balancing.

Usually for color negative I just alter each R, G, B channel individually using curves in gimp until it looks right to my eye, but it took some time before I was able to do this with success, since your brain automatically compensates your vision for color casts. It takes a lot of attention to get it right this way but it can be done.
14 months ago (permalink)

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ndsnntre says:

The reason I have my local photolab develop, scan and make prints. They can do a much much better job than I ever could.
14 months ago (permalink)

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