Now we reach the point to turn ON the Film Negative tool. When you do this it will automatically white-balance the picture (without 20% of border and it will for now ignore any crop you did). Now this white balance step is also not good, because it depends on the content of the picture.
The better way is to use the black unexposed strip in the middle together with the white balance picker from the Film negative tool. This way we get the correct white-point of the film itself which does not change for the whole roll of film. You also can see how the “Input RGB” values are different and the Output Level changed too.
Next we set the output level to a higher value but not too high as it can blow out the whites of the picture.
The last important step is to adjust the Red Ratio and Blue Ratio to balance the film and get neutral grey and consistent color in the highlights like the sky (especially clouds should be neutral grey). Keep in mind that you should do this in a picture preferably with outdoor natural daytime lighting. The Film Negative tool contains a color picker for this “Pick Neutral Spots”-Button. When you activate this button first click one time in a bright neutral spot of the picture (but not an over-exposed part) and then click another time in a dark neutral spot in the picture. This will then set Red and Blue ratio for you. From there you can further tweak it manually to get a good result. The waveform graph can be helpful for that.
If you don’t have good bright and dark neutral spots in your picture just copy the processing settings to another picture to do that. Something like a grey road, white clothes, deep shadows and so on are helpful.
At this point you can copy and paste the processing settings to all other pictures of your scanned film. You will get consistent colors and true neutral blacks (except they have a tint from the lighting of the scene). If your negatives are under- or overexposed you can recover quite a lot by adjusting the Output Level and Reference Exponent of the Film Negative tool to change contrast and brightness in the picture and also use the Cool/Warm slider of the Film Negative tool to compensate for white balance shifts in your image due to different lighting of the scene (like indoor tunsten, outdoor evening, overcast shots and so on and use the Magenta/Green slider to correct color shifts due to older fluorescent lighting of the scene. You also can use it as a creative tool to make the film look more “filmy” by messing with the colors…
Keep in mind to not change the exposure of your camera that takes a picture of the negative. You won’t be able to recover more highlights or shadows but instead you change the white balance and mess up the colors.
The reason is that your camera can fully capture the full dynamic range of a negative image in one shot (using RAW)