Removing colour cast from scanned black and white negatives

[Brooktaw]

Hi

I've got a large collection of black and white negatives from travels in the 1980s that have been scanned at various time over recent years. I'm working on getting them collected together and printed up in book form to leave for my children.

The problem I am having is that variations in colour cast between individual shots are a real distraction when brought together in a sequence.Most of them tend towards the sepia and some towards the blue. I've included a couple of examples in the recent work folder of my website.

Recent Images - Chris Miles

This photo hosted by SmugMug; your photos look better here.

www.cnmiles.ca

I can sometimes correct this on an individual basis as is the case with the image of the horn players but it is a slow and laborious process and what I am looking for is consistency.

Does any one else have this problem or know of a fix?

I use Lightroom Classic with VueScan and Negative Lab pro on a Nikon Coolscan IV

I'm looking for the processing equivalent of a monochrome sensor!!!

 

[Freakscene]

Scan them in, or adjust them to be in greyscale, then follow @Chriscrawfordphoto’s tutorial Toning Black & White Images For The Web - Tutorial by Christopher Crawford if you want them to be other than just greyscale.

I leave my files in greyscale before the very final step: I tried to get my photos as neutrally coloured as possible even when I printed in the darkroom, but digital finally made it really possible.

 

[WoodallP]

Scan them in, or adjust them to be in greyscale, then follow @Chriscrawfordphoto’s tutorial Toning Black & White Images For The Web - Tutorial by Christopher Crawford if you want them to be other than just greyscale.

But has he done one on removing cat hair; surely that’s his biggest problem 😊

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Scans are files and scanned as color? In LR develop part select BW to remove all of the colors.
You could still use colors slides to fine tune BW tones after it.

 

[vitaly66]

Personally I think these images look great just as they are. Especially if, as it seems, your b&w images will be intermingled with color ones, small variations in tonalities will not pose any issues whatsoever for most viewers.

In fact, trying to "homogenize" these photographs with a single uniform tonality may work to the detriment of these images. Each represents a singular moment of vision in various times/places over a period of many years. Attempting to impose an artificial "sameness" over this body of work may detract from their service as an historic record, and from each image's individual aesthetic character.

 

[bullterrier]

I also like it, but...

scan the files in the resolution you want for the book, resampling ,compressing the files tend to oversharp the images with halos.
when you have a well exposed scan to work with, go with the tiff file in Gimp or what you prefer and extract the blue or green layer what,what you prefer...

 

[Jake Mongey]

Having ran a power tower of various coolscans I would always just scan in colour for any old film with a specifically cast, I would then adjust the colour channels individually image by image to try get the tones I wanted out of each and then had a bulk import script in photoshop to bulk convert all images to true greyscale.

Obvious solution is to convert all to true greyscale however I reccomend having some fun with the colour channels before you do so!