Negative Tool not visible in RAW tab 5.8

Hi,

I’ve been scanning some B&W negatives, and importing them to RT for processing. I have been getting pretty shabby results, once they are exported to work with in Gimp.

I see videos where there is a Negative Tool in the RAW tab. The problem is, it isn’t available to me. I’m wondering why that is.

I use an Epson perfection 4990 film scanner, and it saves the files as DNG.

Are those files not compatible with the negative tool? If not, do I have any other options?

Hi Dave, welcome to Pixls!

You are using the old stable 5.8 version (this one), which does not have this option.

This is one of the many reasons you should be using the latest stable development version. You don’t mention your OS, so go here and select the link that is correct for you.

thank you for the quick response. i will give that a try.

I got it to work with that version, but I don’t see any place to set white and black points.

Plus, I’m scanning B&W film. The images are a strange color cast when I enable this mode.

There is a small youtube video, but the image is so small, I don’t see where the black point/white point was on the video. I just don’t see that in this module.

Any clues would be much appreciated.

First of all: I don’t have all that much experience with processing negatives, be it colour or B&W. That being said, here is what I know.

The Film Negative tool is, at its core, meant for colour negatives.

There’s another complicating factor here: The scan itself is a colour image. So you basically need to adjust the imported scan first to get rid of, colour and other, imperfections introduced during the negative scanning process and after that you can edit the negative itself.

About getting it to work for black and white negatives: Using the Pick neutral spots method seems to do a very decent job (my limited experience is speaking here). After activating it you need to (1) select a neutral light spot in the image and then (2) select a dark spot (choosing a lightest and darkest spot that isn’t clipped/crushed works best).

You might tinker with the sliders of that module a bit after this is done to get things a tad better (the 3 lockable colour pickers show that there is still a bit of colour present in certain spots). Using the Pick white balance spot picker might or might not help. It seems to depends on the scan.

You can turn on the Black-and-White module in its most neutral form (=desaturation) after this step, that will get rid of all the colour info for you.

I think it is best to start using the normal tools available to you to edit the image after the automated pick neutral spots 1-2 step (+ maybe the B&W module).

Anyway, hope this helps.