Best settings for color negatives (120) on 4490?

[ishpop]

I have now had my 4490 for a week. I read through about 10 threads on it in Flickr and on here. I am using professional mode and checking of "color correction" as well as ice.

I noticed that when I scanned color positives, without the color correcting, the photos were EXTREMELY dark and didn;t look at all like the actual positive, so I left the color correcting on.

With the color negatives, and color correction off, everything is extremely yellow and definitely not at all true. To the point where it would be extremely difficult to try and replicate true color in Lightroom. So i turn on color correction for them as well. Problem is it seems to just pump up the saturation a ton, so I then go into curves in the tool and tone it down a little, get the exposure ebetter, then scan.

Am I making it harder than it is or doing the wrong thing?

Nonetheless, this is Portra 160NC, I still dont think I got the colors 100% true though, this doesn;t quite look like Portra to me:

Here is one particular photo that for whatever reason, with color correction on, came out very "portra" to me:

Maybe because it has a sublte cast to it.

My end goal is simply to get the colors as true to the negative as possible.

Thanks for any tips!

 

[hans voralberg]

Strange, the last one definitely look more Portra, but I never had problem with mine 4490, I only need colour correction for BW negative, which make everything looks sepia. In the advance setting there is a 18% gray picker iirc, and some colour correction tools so you could try that ?

 

[rich815]

Looks pretty good to me. To try to get a perfect result straight out of the scanner is bound to disappoint and can often limit your ability to finish off the file without clipping and color issues. Do your scans with an eye towards doing your last tweaking and touch up in Photoshop or similar.

Your scan goal should be to get a decent balance of color and most importantly to capture the widest range of tones without clipping highlights and shadows (and to scan in the highest bit you can). This will often result in a fairly flat initial scan file with colors that may need a bit of punch, that will often have perhaps a slight bit of color cast, and be of fairly moderate if not very flat contrast. Then all three of those can be finalized and fixed up in subtle fashion using your more powerful and more precise imaging editing software.

Seeing your results above I'd say you are getting a very good scan but I'd back off a bit on the contrast by pulling back both sides of the histogram pointers in the scanning software so as to prevent clipping. Again, this will result in a scan that is in need of some contrast but you will preserve the highlights and shadows better and be in a better position to do more minute touch-ups and fix-ups in your image editing software. More work, yes. But nothing worth doing well is usually very easy.

 

[ishpop]

Seeing your results above I'd say you are getting a very good scan but I'd back off a bit on the contrast by pulling back both sides of the histogram pointers in the scanning software so as to prevent clipping. Again, this will result in a scan that is in need of some contrast but you will preserve the highlights and shadows better and be in a better position to do more minute touch-ups and fix-ups in your image editing software. More work, yes. But nothing worth doing well is usually very easy.

Thanks for the advice Rich. I think I didn't realize at first I needed to use the histogram for every scan and I am starting to grasp what you mean about starting off with a flat and off-color image.

I am going to give it another shot tonight and see if I can find a workflow that produces some reasonable accuracy.