As suggested in this thread Negadoctor neewbie asking for Help I did give darktable a try to convert this Kodak Gold 200 negative, made by a Nikon FE + Nikkor 55mm:
Creating a color variant with darktable turned out to be tedious, so I made a black and white picture. I’m very interested to see if you manage to create a good color image with darktable, but black and white is also exciting in the snow.
Nothing fancy done here. I simply used negadoctor in DT to invert the image. I then exported an xcf file which I opened in GIMP. I then cropped the image in GIMP and applied the auto function for levels to get this result. I didn’t try any further editing on this image yet as I wanted to demonstrate these fundamental steps first.
20250228-101231__7801720.tiff.xmp (11.8 KB)
A third attempt adding an instance of color zones module to try and remove the warm color tint in the white snow. The XCF files probably are of little help here as I am now editing a tiff from GIMP. 20250228-101231__7801720.tiff.xmp (12.4 KB)
The histogram in GIMP indicates that the light (LED) consists of red, green and blue virtually monochromatic sources. Therefore the resultant image can only contain these wavelengths. It would be interesting to know if the result would be different using a light source with a continuous spectrum.
Thanks @clennep, that version is much easier to work with. Much less fiddling around in Negadoctor was needed.
This is my “neutral” conversion where I haven’t tried to do anything other than develop the scanned negative. No artistic interpretation given, so it’s meant to be faithful to the original shot. I think the slight blue colour cast in the sky and on the snow is probably realistic to what the scene was like (overcast/snowing).
and tried the color balance rgb module on this image.
