How's my colour neg scanning and Post Processing?

[Naumoski]

Really nice portraits and mood, by the way 🙂

 

[Arjay]

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

No - this looks pretty good to me in terms of color.

I still think the picture is a little overexposed - the skin tones in the girl's face are a tad too light. That, however isn't necessarily a scanning problem because there's still some detail available in the face. You can fix the overexposure using a gradation curve, or simply by pulling the brightness slider a little to the darker side (but be gentle - don't give her a suntan 😉 ).

 

[Pete B]

Really nice portraits and mood, by the way 🙂

Hey, thanks. I like the look of your flickr account. I'll have a better look later when I've more time (I'm at work). Thanks for your encouragement.
Pete

 

[Pete B]

No - this looks pretty good to me in terms of color.

I still think the picture is a little overexposed - the skin tones in the girl's face are a tad too light. That, however isn't necessarily a scanning problem because there's still some detail available in the face. You can fix the overexposure using a gradation curve, or simply by pulling the brightness slider a little to the darker side (but be gentle - don't give her a suntan 😉 ).

Yes, the face is too light. These two similar pics are quite different exposures. One looks good on the negative, and the other under exposed on the negative. The over exposure has been cause somewhere through the PP process. ColorPerfect will clip at both ends so I dialled in some correction in CP to bring highlights back. This is one of those scenarios where I should probably do things from scratch working with levels rather than CP.
Thanks for your comments.
Pete

 

[Tim Gray]

Ok cool. I've never worked with NX. I found when playing around with ColorPerfect and doing the white bal click, a bit of work still needed to be done. I used curves in photoshop to do that. Curves has a gray dropper which helps you tweak the over color balance pretty easily.

 

[Pete B]

Ok cool. I've never worked with NX. I found when playing around with ColorPerfect and doing the white bal click, a bit of work still needed to be done. I used curves in photoshop to do that. Curves has a gray dropper which helps you tweak the over color balance pretty easily.

It sounds like I use similar droppers in NX. I think I'm on the right path really but sometimes I just seem to hit an image that I can't get acceptable. I think my previous post with the colour dropper is a red herring. I was wondering if a better photoshop package had a colour dropper where I could say stipulate skin tone colours and adjust but then adjust colour balance in the lowlights and highlights seperately. At the moment I click with the Blacks dropper, grey and White dropper and hope that colours will be balanced through the range of tones but it doesn't always seem to be the case. Quite frustrating really.
Pete

 

[Ranchu]

Nobody but Epson knows how the sensor/light source in the V700 renders color, so any third party is making a judgement call about what colors the film likely is. Their call may be different than fuji's. The chain of custody of what the colors on the film actually are, including the mask, is lost. The rendition of colors can cause you to warp your neutrals in order to fix the rendition.

 

[atlcruiser]

This stuff drives me crazy!

I am using LR 3, V700 and both epson and vuescan

I followed this:
http://benneh.net/blog/index.php/2008/04/21/better-colour-neg-scanning-with-vuescan/ and can get pretty good colors most of the time.

I still have 2 main issues:

1. Finding the WB point in the above tutorial. I can find one that looks OK but after 4 or 5 attempts I start to forget the original colors

2. I forget what it really looked like and start to color it on what i think it "should" look like.

The real soultion to all of my issues is a gray card 🙂

I recieved some good advice here not long ago....

I went out and took shots of a grey card in noon sun. The first case was porta 160nc. I saved this as a WB preset in LR. Since the porta is a very neutral color film I have found that it gives a pretty nice WB to many other films.

Eventually I want to have a noon summer/winter preset for all of my clr films. When I am off on a trip, in a new area, or with a new film I now take a gray card shot and keep it as a preset.

Short course I am using the vuescan to get the base color of the film removed then using the gray cards to set the WB

 

[charjohncarter]

I'm with atlcruiser. It drives me crazy. Lately, I've added CFS which is a correction software plugin (for me). So now I can use CC in Picasa3, PSE6, CFS(ystems), and pick the closest. Then I use Color Variation in PSE6 to turn. But sometimes, I just scrape the negative I can't get anything out of it. CFS is really complicated and the tutorials are written with no paragraphs.

I thought maybe I should put a paragraph in here now. So CFS has, I think lots of potential but I'm not great with it yet.

Here is the flickr group for CFS:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/colorperfect/

 

[Renzsu]

So, here's what I'm thinking.. why go through all of this trouble? What's so bad about having the character of the film showing through in your final image? Why even bother going for one type of print film over the other if we're going to process them all to look like a perfect representation of how your remember the scene?
Now I don't have the experience of working with darkrooms and darkroom printing, but I don't think this amount of control was ever available in the old days when printing from film, so why now fuss about it so much? Why not shoot digital instead?
This is why I prefer slide film when shooting color. You get some kind of base point in your slide. After scanning you only have to make sure you get something resembling your slide and you're done. Then if you want to go the extra mile, you can modify it to death, but at least you'll know you're far removed from what it ever originally was...

 

[Tim Gray]

Pete, sometimes I need to tweak the curves suggested by using the gray dropper. It takes a bit to recognize what color you don't like and what moves you should make, but moving the green midpoint left or right, or maybe the red, etc., can make a big improvement off of the curves generated by the droppers. Don't know if you have that kind of control with NX though - you do in Photoshop.

Renzu, I don't think it's about getting rid of the character of the film, it's about avoiding yucky color due to crummy scanner software. For me, Vuescan always gives kind of weak colors with a nasty cast. It's not about 'negating the orange mask', because in reality, that's pretty easy. Nor is it about using film profiles - I think that's a load of bull for the most part. It's just avoiding crummy inversion routines that mess up your color. Nikonscan always gave me good colors out of the box, but it's slow, and while ICE is great, you lose some sharpness from it - it's either one or its off. And it doesn't always run properly on people's systems. So we sometimes resort to other methods.

If I had a drum scanner or a flextight, I'm sure I'd be much happier with the software provided with the scanner.

 

[Pete B]

Well, it's good to know I'm not the only one who doesn't find it easy.
I wrote a post HERE about using the V700, Vuescan and colorperfect for anyone who's interested. However, I don't often get a perfect image straight out of ColorPerfect so the file moves onto another software program to try to get shot of casts.
Renzu, my ideal would be as little processing as possible to let the delicate colours and tone graduation of the film show through. That's the point for me. More and more I'm trying to take ColorPerfect out of the system. It's very easy to end up with all film types looking the same which is not what we want. Colour balance is a basic requirement of digitalizing images. It's no use having colour balanced in the mid tones but off in the highlights or low lights. I can't understand why there aren't better or more intuitive programs. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself; success isn't easily won and I've not been long at it.

Pete

 

[Pete B]

Pete, sometimes I need to tweak the curves suggested by using the gray dropper. It takes a bit to recognize what color you don't like and what moves you should make, but moving the green midpoint left or right, or maybe the red, etc., can make a big improvement off of the curves generated by the droppers. Don't know if you have that kind of control with NX though - you do in Photoshop.

I have tried slightly altering the gamma on each of the colour curves in Levels if that is what you mean. I've had some success with this but wonder if the whole of the tonal colour range is affected in the same way or if only a short range is balanced.

If I had a drum scanner or a flextight, I'm sure I'd be much happier with the software provided with the scanner.

Amen! The company that comes out with Imacon software at Epson/Plustek prices will wipe the board.

Pete

 

[tokengirl]

For a few months I've been trying to better my scanning. I'm not sure what I want to ask. Perhaps I just need some comments on these results and some ideas how to improve my method. I scan using a V700 producing a negative Raw file with all the info. I usually use ColorPerfect then try to colour balance by eye in Nikon's Capture NX. If ColorPerfect doesn't seem to be working out I'll work from scratch in NX. Sometimes I feel my results look a little cross-processed so another's eyes would be appreciated.
These files are Fuji 800Z. Any constructive comments will be welcome. I know I'm not a great photographer but I would like to stay with film for as long as possible.
Pete

The only major thing I see as a problem is that some of the photos have a bit of a green tint to them.

I am not familiar with Capture NX, as I use Lightroom. But I would think there are similar white balance tools?

Here are a couple of screen shots with before/after illustrating what I did in Lightroom, perhaps you can translate it to NX. FWIW, I did not use the eyedropper tool to automatically balance. Rather, I just adjusted the green/magenta slider until it looked right to me. I find that the eyedropper tool it very hit-or-miss, better to do it manually.

 

[tlitody]

I found in Elements Adjust Colour, Adjust hue/saturation and there is any eye dropper tool in there so clicking on a patch of grey on the hat I reduced the cyan to give this result. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

View attachment 83979


Pete:bang:

The colour dropper works really well with known reference colours such as grey and white. But with skin colours you never know what the colours should be so you have to be careful making adjustments based on skin tone as it effects everything else too unless you have isolated them.

Many images have a bluish cast which is usually cyan and not blue at all. What I do is go to hue/saturation and check each of RGBCYM by selecting it and then pushing the adjuster all the way up to max to see what effect this has. That will show you which colour is the main contributor to any cast in the image and then you adjust colour with either the hue/saturation or colour balance tools.
Where there are known reference colours such as greyscale colours from black to white then it gets easier to check your results.
Note that if your colour dropper only gives RGB values then if it shows excess blue that will include cyan so the hue saturation check gives finer information and subtler adkustments than the colour balance tool.
And of course you must know that the opposites of RGB are CYM so for example, too much Cyan can be corrected either by reducing Cyan or increasing Red. But which way you do it is dependant on the effect it has to the whole image.
And finally the cyan/blue cast many images have is quite natural from sky light. It is subjective whether it should be completely removed. Use your instincts on what looks right to you in the final print.

 

[atlcruiser]

Tokengirl and I do this the same basic way. The only real diffeence for me is that i have some presets from scanned film.


I agree with some of the other posters....it is very easy to get waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to wrapped up in this and it is almost 100% subjective.

After i remove the film base in scanning I will play with some presets then adj as needed with the LR3 sliders as Tokengirl showed above. often I will leave it for a day or so then return with "fresh eyes" to do any final tweaks.

The shot below was done like this and the color is exactly as I remember it ..so it might or might not be reality 🙂

 

[tlitody]

I can't understand why there aren't better or more intuitive programs.

Problem is that negative films have an orangish colour mask in them which is there to aid printing with an enlarger. Some modern films have had the mask altered by manufacturers so they are better for scanning than enlarger printing. But the mask is still there. But the mask (and everything else) varies with development, different developers, old developer etc so the scanner manufacturers film type selection can never be sure to take out the mask and adjust colour correctly. This is where using a good lab that keeps tight checks on developer helps.

Then when you get to your adjustment software it has no reference point because the input may be good colour or bad colour, it just doesn't know. So it comes down to your ability to make accurate judgement and adjustment. So ultimately bad colour is down to operator error or palin bad taste 😀

 

[Tim Gray]

As far as neutralizing the orange mask, its really not a hard problem. It's always described online as the big issue with color correct negative scans, but it's not a big deal at all. The color mask is not there to aid in traditional printing. It's there to aid color accuracy of exposed tones. It's proportional to exposure of the various layers and helps fix dye imperfections. What you do is correct for the orange mask on non-exposed areas, which leaves some of the orange mask still where it is denser in the actual image. But it's a mask, so its density varies across the image, helping fix dye imperfections where it is needed most.

More detail here.

Unfortunately a lot of the scanner software is an afterthought and full of compromises. Vuescan is cheap and works on a lot of scanners but gives me funny color. Silverfast is ok in my experience, but expensive and not much better for me than Nikonscan - the color always looked slightly off to me. Nikonscan gives decent color, but is slow, buggy on newer systems, and never updated. I have no idea if Epson software is decent; never used it. Even something like Photoshop - the 'invert' command is not the inversion we want and the tools for gamma changes aren't very straight forward - moving the gray slider in levels isn't exactly gamma, there's some additional stuff going on when the shift gets large.


Re: white balancing. This only goes for Photoshop. I'm finding that bringing a scan into Camera Raw (would be like working in Lightroom) and then using the white balance tools as above sometimes gives strange results that I have a hard time ever correcting for later.

The gray dropper in the curves tool (add a curves adjustment layer) is decent if you can find a middle gray to click on. However I'm getting what appears to be better results for me if I instead use the white dropper. Double click on the white dropper and a color picker dialogue appears. Then find an approximate white or light gray surface and option click. This takes a reading of that spot and sets the target value of the white dropper to the same color. Don't move the mouse now. Tab until you get to the L, a, and b inputs and zero out the a and b. You should now have an L reading of that spot you option clicked. Hit enter twice, then click the mouse. This will set the spot you just clicked to neutral. Instead of doing the mouse dance I described above, you could use a color sampler to get the L value and then just click with the white dropper on that sampler after setting the target values to have a and b zero and an L of whatever the sampler reads.

Anyway, a bit confusing, but it seems to work well. At some point I'll write some of this up if people are interested.

 

[Pete B]

Thanks for that Tokengirl. I do use similar sliders in NX. Unfortunately, as I increase magenta to remove green the blue cast to the grey/brown hat remains. It was this issue that made me start this thread. It's as though the whole image is cross-processed somehow. Often these sliders work the trick but for some reason not these. Now where's that brick wall? Ah, yes....:bang:

Pete

The only major thing I see as a problem is that some of the photos have a bit of a green tint to them.

I am not familiar with Capture NX, as I use Lightroom. But I would think there are similar white balance tools?

Here are a couple of screen shots with before/after illustrating what I did in Lightroom, perhaps you can translate it to NX. FWIW, I did not use the eyedropper tool to automatically balance. Rather, I just adjusted the green/magenta slider until it looked right to me. I find that the eyedropper tool it very hit-or-miss, better to do it manually.

 

[Pete B]

. So it comes down to your ability to make accurate judgement and adjustment. So ultimately bad colour is down to operator error or palin bad taste 😀

Don't remind me! 😀
Pete