The “reference frame” was scanned using the scanning software’s “auto” settings.
The other frame I scanned with all color correction, etc. turned off at 24-bit color. So I guess it’s sort of like a “raw” file coming straight from a digital camera?
I shot all frames with the same camera settings and lighting setup.
Longer version if you’re curious:
I got inspire by Gaspar Marquez’s Bodyscape Series (NSFW). It’s sort of like cubism done with cameras. I wanted to try something similar.
This is my first time scanning negatives, and some frames on the roll came out with a green cast to them. I think maybe the red clothing threw off the auto-exposure settings on the scanner, and it compensated by putting a green cast to the whole frame.
My ideas to solve this problem was to scan everything with color corrections turned off during the scan, then I’d get one frame to look good in RT, and then use that processing profile on the rest of the frames in the roll. Theoretically, I thought this would be the easiest way since everything from the shooting, to the scanning was all done with the same settings.
I’m having a hard time getting the colors from the “raw” negative to look like the good-looking “reference frame.”
All of my experience has been editing digital photos in RT, so I may be unfamiliar with certain settings that could help with this.
So far, in RT I have tried messing with
EV Compensation Slider
Black point slider
RGB Curves
Tone Curves
Or maybe my idea of delaying all digital processing until I got the images into RT is fundamentally flawed because I don’t understand much about gammas and so forth. img20211218_15453697.tif (2.4 MB) reference frame 6.tif (2.3 MB)
Maybe a dumb question, but did you try the film invert option in RT ?
Or negadocter in darktable.
I see you posted tifs, so I assume you scanned with a dedicated scanner (not a digital camera as scanner ).
The trick is always to make sure there is no auto-exposure correction. Nor silly scanning software does a preview scan, and then adjusts the analog gain of the scanner.
If you want to copy inversion settings between all frames, you need all scans to use the same analog gain/exposure so you can copy the inversion settings.
I can’t check the files (on a phone ) but are they 16bit ? This is a must if trying to invert film negatives scanned as positive.
edit: I took a quick look at your images. They are 16bit so OK, they are just very small crops.
But they are not negatives at all, so I’m very confused about what you’re doing, or what did when you say you scan without any color correction turned off.
If it were film negatives, you clearly had some color correction on because they are positives now.
Or are you talking about slide-film? That shouldn’t be too hard to get a consistent look between scans?
Those are 35mm film negatives. They aren’t crops - that is the full 35mm frame scanned at 600DPI. I did not need a really high resolution for what I’m trying to do with the scans.
I scanned them in an Epson V750 using Epson Scan 2 software.
For the one image where the colors look correct, the Epson Scan 2 software did the auto-gamma and color adjustments for me. And what you see is the result.
For the image that looks all washed out, I told the scan software to turn off all corrections and just save the info to a 24-bit color TIFF. I guess the software still did invert the colors, though. My plan was to set the color corrections manually in RT and then just batch process all frames from that roll once I made an RT profile that worked well for one of the images. Sorry I can’t be more specific. I am just learning how to use this thing. I am stuck with that scanner and software because that is what they have at the public photo lab that I used.
Well I’ll be damned! Looks like I was overthinking this! Thanks for the PP3. I did tweak the saturation a bit but you got me 90% of the way there. Thanks for pulling me out of my rut.
