Negative lab pro vuescan5/4/2023 ![]() The scan must contain some of the orange mask in the unexposed portion of the film, either along the edge of the film or between frames.Ģ. Here's one way to deal with it in Photoshop or other image editing programs:ġ. ![]() It's a mask that exists only in the shadows and lower mid-tones. It is not an overall orange tint that can simply be removed by adjusting (global) color balance. In processing a color negative digitally, besides inverting the colors, you must at least deal with that orange mask, if not other non-linearities. It "disappears" from the positive paper image but without it, the image would have a corresponding blue tint in the shadows and mid-tones. The mask is there to correct for (among other things) non-linearities in the response of the paper emulsion. One of the visible parts of the color management process of color negative material is the very noticeable orange mask in the developed film image. Most photographers still object needing to understand and correctly use to this necessary process.)Īll we had to do was select "Daylight" vs "Tungsten" film (to account for a huge range of color temperature variation, which the materials could not quite handle all on their own) and somehow, color prints pretty accurately reproduced whatever was in front of the camera. (In digital photography, none of that behind the scenes help is happening and we're expected to understand and use Color Management (Operating System-level Color Management capability, ICC profiles, calibration of monitors and printers, etc). Not without replacing the half of the equations of at least one of them by some alternative science. One really did not work without the other. Kodak (and other companies') color scientists built an enormous amount of color management into those two complimentary products. Since the advent of digital photography, almost no one realizes the complex color science and color management that was handled completely unbeknownst, "behind the scenes" by the color negative film and color printing paper process. It was much more labor intensive than scanning a color negative and working on it in Photoshop. I invite you to a several-day learning session using color filters or a color filter head in an enlarger to print color images in a dark room. Kodak : "Just push the button, we do the rest," was no joke. You don't realize it, but what you are asking is essentially, "Can I ignore and bypass the complex color transformations that were (are) happening between the color layers in the film emulsion and the complementary layers in color printing paper emulsion and the chemical transformations that enable those processes to digitally mimic the multi-step negative/positive process that was (is) color film/paper photography."Īll the color science was all built-in. I want to set the camera's WB, shoot the negative, invert the image colors and be done. I want to save time by shooting with my camera, and not have it eaten up by post processing afterwards. There are usually vague references to post-processing with software but that seems like a waste of time. Silverfast used to be the best known software for this purpose, but it is a long time since I last scanned film negatives. I think the easy solution is to get some software designed to process digitised colour negatives. Even then, the characteristics of colour negative film are quite a lot different from a digital sensor and the usual colour balancing for digital cameras may not work very well. That base colour needs to be subtracted away before you do any colour balancing. You can see it if you look at the unexposed film strip between frames. Not if you want half-way reasonable colour.Īs you say, colour negatives have a colour cast to them. I've tried a couple of different ways using blank frames in my negative strips (both overexposed and underexposed) but there is always a strange cast to the end product. I have yet to read of a good way to set the white balance correct in camera so that when the image is inverted, the color comes out correct. I've gone through numerous threads on "scanning" color film negatives using a camera with macro lens and film holder.
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