Personally I haven’t been able to get good results using Film Negative. Maybe it works better with some negative films than others. Yes, with the normal tools in RT, you need to apply a reverse tone curve, and some of the tools work backwards, but it doesn’t take long to figure it out and when you see a slider does the opposite of what you expect you just move it the other way. I haven’t found it to be a big deal.
I haven’t digitized many color negs, and most of those have processed reasonably well by just reversing the curve, getting a neutral gray from the film border and fine tuning with the white balance sliders. Getting it exactly right needs a bit more fiddling. Once you have a good profile it can be applied to other frames in the same film.
I am glad, however, that the bulk of my digitizing is with color transparencies and B&W negs, as they are easier to work with.
To me it’s not only a problem of expertise (that can be gained quickly by reading one of the many tutorials found online, it’s not strictly RT-specific). It’s mostly a problem of the amount of tweaking needed to process a single negative, let alone an entire roll. Specifically, having to tweak RGB curves was the most frustrating thing to me. After you’ve carefully set them up, if you touch anything that happens before in the chain (like exposure or WB), you end up messing up everything, so you’re limited to use Lab controls.
I guess some people have good “eye”, and can quickly get the settings right, and never touch them again. Personally, i’m terrible at that, i’m always uncertain or unsatisfied with my result, and get into an endless loop of tweaking
Moreover, when i found the Wikipedia article i’ve referenced in the other post, i discovered that inverting the tone curve (or using the invert tool in Gimp) is just not the right math to represent how film works (hence the need for manual tweaking). So i thought: why not start with the right math, and then apply some manual tweaking?
Please, can you share the make/model of the panel? I’m alway curious to try different backlights
This is exaclty what i do as well. My wheapon of choice is a cheap speedlight reflecting on a piece of paper. I had ordered a Kaiser Slimlight Plano, but i returned it because it wasn’t bright enough to shoot at f8, and didn’t beat my speedlight+paper setup in terms of “flatness”.
Please, can you post (or PM) one or more samples that are giving bad results? I’d like to investigate the problem
I use a Porta-Trace 8x11" LED light box. I have another cheaper one from ebay I use for sorting slides etc, but it’s around 7-8800K and probably a low CRI. The Porta-Trace gives good color.
The exposure times are generally around 1/4 to 1/15 second, which is the range where shutter and mirror vibration are at the worst. To counteract this I use live view and a 2 second self-timer delay, which works well.
I used to use a flash for the light source, but now prefer the light box because I can leave the aperture at f8 or f9 and just adjust the time. In addition, it means I don’t need a separate focusing light. I also found that it was difficult to get even lighting across the frame for medium and large format film, although it worked okay with 35mm.
I don’t know about the math of just inverting the curve, but it does seem to work reasonably well.
I’ll dig up a suitable raw file shot from a color neg.
You absolutely need some further editing (tweaking?) after having applied film negative. But the amount of editing needed is much less compared to the situation when you use the basic RT tools only?
I suppose that the film negative tool is the first you would apply working on a negative. Where is film negative placed in the pipeline (I assume it is placed very early) and is it designed to be applied only once without the need for adjustments later on? A later adjustment of the film negative settings will surely cause a need to readjust other tools placed later on in the pipeline.
Okay, I’ve played around with Film Negative some more and need to back pedal and apologize (after all, I’m Canadian, eh!). Film Negative does seem to work very well. In this case I’ve tried to do only minimal adjustments such as picking the light and dark gray spots, adjusting the colour temperature and tint, and some basic adjustments to exposure and LAB. Thanks for this great tool!
Yes, that is exactly the goal of the film negative tool: reduce the amount of manual editing needed
It is applied right before Demosaic (step 2 in the pipeline) , and yes, film negative parameters should be set before further editing.
In other words: first use the film negative tool to get a good positive to work with, and then proceed with further editing as you would normally do with a positive image.
@Morgan_Hardwood : great job in the docs page, very clear explanation, thank you very much!
@troodon : thank you for testing and sharing such a great sample!
Can i ask you what type of film it is?
I photographed that negative a couple years ago and at the moment I’m not sure where it is. It’s my dad’s photo from the 1960s, shot on 6x6cm film, probably a Kodak pro film.
