Does anyone know how to fix the color on a copied color negative?
Youâve phrased this question too generally to get a good response. If you want to get the most out of each image, each will have itâs own processing necessities.
Please be more specific and/or post the image in question. What do you mean âcopied?â Is the image still a negative (in this case you could invert the colors)?
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The image is still a negative. I want to convert the raw file to preserve as much of the dynamic range of the negative as possible. And yes I need to invert the image and make the colors look as normal as possible.
Hi @genebrown48! Which program are you trying to do this in at the moment? The answer will vary depending on what youâre using.
I have been coverting the .jpg files in photoshop but I really want to use the .nef files instead. I have tried ACR, Vuescan, and DXO Optics Pro Elite without success. I havenât tried Raw Therapee yet. I was hoping someone here had and would share their success.
In darktable there is the âinvertâ module.
It allows to select the colour of the orange mask of the film material either by a colour selector or with a picker. See https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04.html.php. Just in case you want to try darktable.
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You still havenât explained what there is to be fixed with the color, what you tried, what youâre stuck on, how ACR, Vuescan, and DXO Optics Pro Elite failed.
Providing a sample raw file is the best way to get help.
Does this mean that whatever method you used to scan the original film produced both jpegs and .nef RAW files? Or did you only get jpegs, and you want to produce .nef files to work with instead? This is the part of your question that remains unclear. If it is the first condition (you have .nef files already), then you can just use an invert method as mentioned in the previous posts. But if itâs the second, thatâs probably an issue with the software related to your scanner, which you will need to solve to get the benefits of RAW processing. Then, the question is âIs there any F/OSS software that interfaces with my scanner to produce RAW files?â I couldnât answer that, since Iâve not tried this, but I think someone here might know if that is possible or notâŚ
This comes down to, âWhat does ârawâ mean?â Scanners are not digital cameras, they always use their own light source. Scanner sensors do not work in the same way as digital camera sensors do. In photography, ârawâ implies being in a form requiring demosaicing. In scanners, demosaicing is usually not necessary or possible. The demosaicing algorithms used in photography software treat photosite dumps in a Bayer-type pattern; scanners donât have those as far as I know. A ârawâ file from a scanner would be a dump of data (RGB, monochrome, whateva), just like a TIFF, it might even be stored in a TIFF file, it would just lack some processing, such as a gamma curve for example. Most scanners and most scanning software donât support raw dumps.
Conclusion: For photography, if your scanner and software combination can produce 16-bit TIFF files, thatâs all you need.
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The Vuescan software can produce DNG files. Iâm not sure if the DNG is as youâve described it above, or if Vuescan is doing something to make it more like a camera raw.
I do, however, use the Vuescan software and Iâd be happy to provide a raw file from it if youâd like to inspect it.
DNG does not mean âcamera rawâ. In fact DNG is based on TIFF/EP. The DNG file from vuescan could be anything. I am curious what it is, so you could upload a sample, but please make it stay online for a month as I wonât be around for the next two weeks to check it out.
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While I have a film scanner it is painfully slow. I had almost 300 color negatives to digitize in three days. I photographed them with my Nikon D800e. I really wanted to use the raw (.nef) files but could not find a way to invert the raw files with the software I already have. Darktable sounds interesting but I only have a Windows 7 pc right now. I ended up taking the camera .jpgs through Photoshop to make corrected .jpgs. My client was pleased with the results but I thought the results would have been better if I had been able to use the raw files. Since I have thousands of my own color negatives to digitize, I would really like to get to highest quality I could.
You could do this: open the raw files in RawTherapee and use the âinverted colorsâ LUT in film emulation to invert the colors. Hope this works!
Thanks! I havenât tried that but I will. What I ended up doing to get this
particular job done was convert the raw files to 16 bit .tif files and then
invert and color correct them in photoshop. They didnât look quite right to
me but my customer thought they were fine. Thanks again for the tip!
Gene
First see http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Negative