An alternative to Negative Lab Pro and Lr has to exist (C-41 reversal and orange mask removal)?!

[GLS]

I find glassless holders and slide frames very overrated. It's far more important to have the negative as flat as you can. Glassless is never going to achieve that.
Use a drop of scanning fluid or just plain naphtha to get very little material to material optical loss or Newton rings.

I have encountered no issues at all with varying sharpness across the frame using this method. I use f11 on the macro when capturing the single shots, so the DoF more than covers any small deviations from perfect planarity of the film. If I were shooting at 1:1 and stitching multiple shots per frame the issue may possibly be more relevant, but I haven't as yet bothered trying that.

Messing around with scanning fluids would only add mess and tedium to the process.

 

[Helge]

I have encountered no issues at all with varying sharpness across the frame using this method. I use f11 on the macro when capturing the single shots, so the DoF more than covers any small deviations from perfect planarity of the film. If I were shooting at 1:1 and stitching multiple shots per frame the issue may possibly be more relevant, but I haven't as yet bothered trying that.

Messing around with scanning fluids would only add mess and tedium to the process.

If you want to get the best out of your photos and also quite important, aid alignment, flat is important.
You are selling your 35mm frames very short if you think a single shot DSLR grab will do them full justice.
Medium format is of course a whole other story yet again.
Any kind of good scanning fluid will evaporate without residue, and will in the end be much less bother than trying to work around buckling film.

 

[GLS]

You are selling your 35mm frames very short if you think a single shot DSLR grab will do them full justice.
Medium format is of course a whole other story yet again.

I'm talking about 120 film. I don't shoot 135.

I find even a single frame from my D810 is enough to capture a huge amount of detail from the film. Certainly more than good enough for web distribution, and already superior to any results I've seen from flatbeds. If I was planning to make a huge print of a special shot I would go the extra mile to make a multi-shot stitch of it, but otherwise it is creating exponentially more work for very little gain.

 

[Helge]

I'm talking about 120 film. I don't shoot 135.

I find even a single frame from my D810 is enough to capture a huge amount of detail from the film. Certainly more than good enough for web distribution, and already superior to any results I've seen from flatbeds. If I was planning to make a huge print of a special shot I would go the extra mile to make a multi-shot stitch of it, but otherwise it is creating exponentially more work for very little gain.

Photography is in big part the art of cutting with view cones and DoF, and later culling your images heavily.
So the art of visual selection.
Getting down to one or two frames out of maybe a hundred, that are actually printed is this.
Having the ability to capture the full detail of the frame in those instances is important.
Keeping the film flat with medium format is impossible in free air.

Web sharing is something else entirely, since most images won’t be viewed at more than 8MP at best.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

If you want to get the best out of your photos and also quite important, aid alignment, flat is important.
You are selling your 35mm frames very short if you think a single shot DSLR grab will do them full justice.
Medium format is of course a whole other story yet again.
Any kind of good scanning fluid will evaporate without residue, and will in the end be much less bother than trying to work around buckling film.

This depends on whether you’re shooting color or black and white, and how much resolution your DSLR has.

If you’re shooting black and white, once you white balance for your light source, you can treat each sensel directly as if it where monochrome (if you wrote your own code to do this) as you’re taking a picture of a frame that doesn’t contain any color information, so the only real color comes from your light source. Dial that out via white balance and you have effectively shot with no CFA. Doing that *very dramatically* increases the amount of visible fine detail in the photo. If you don’t do that, it’s debayered, then converted to BW, which eats a whole pile of potential resolution you’ve otherwise captured.

If it’s color, then it’s about the same as shooting it with a DSLR instead of film.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Photography is in big part the art of cutting with view cones and DoF, and later culling your images heavily.
So the art of visual selection.
Getting down to one or two frames out of maybe a hundred, that are actually printed is this.
Having the ability to capture the full detail of the frame in those instances is important.
Keeping the film flat with medium format is impossible in free air.

Web sharing is something else entirely, since most images won’t be viewed at more than 8MP at best.

No arguments from me on any of these points, except that, that’s not necessarily why most people shoot film. Everybody has their own reasons and uses. They may not match up with yours. That’s totally OK.

For me, I shoot a lot of 135 for casual and family documentary type stuff, mostly in black and white. My reasons are I want a physical negative that’s fairly permanent that I’m not going to lose unless my house burns to the ground (a real possibility lately, at least in CA). I shoot a lot and cull very little.

I also shoot larger formats, but that is reserved for more formal stuff where I’m shooting with a specific intent and purpose, and in those instances, what format becomes a question of planned output size. If I’m looking to make a number of very nice 8x10s to 13x19s, then it’ll probably be on 120, either 6x6, or in a 6x7 back for 4x5, or in my Fuji 6x9. If I’m looking to go much larger than 13x19, then it’s 4x5 all the way. What format I shot and planned type of output will totally dictate what I do after that. Here I shoot not a lot and apply a lot more rigorous culling.

Point is: that’s just me. If somebody else does it differently or has different requirements, that’s totally OK.

Now, all that being said, a fair amount of what’s being talked about here in my experience, adds a lot of extra effort. Does it give better results? Generally, yes. Are those results worth it? Only you can decide that for you.

 

[Les Sarile]

I get perfect negative scans from my Epson scanner with no correction. Lovely machine.

PE

BTW, Kodak has described some of their color negatives as "scanner friendly". I wondered what they meant by that because on the other hand, I also recall a Kodak rep state that there are no standards for scanning.

 

[Photo Engineer]

As I understand it, scanner friendly films have no rough retouching surface or other such "pebbly" surfaces. This improves the scan quality by giving the scanner a smooth surface to act on.

PE

 

[Les Sarile]

PE, thanks for that. Having scanned over 40K frames of various film types, I've found my Coolscans+Nikonscan makes all of them scanner friendly . . .

 

[lantau]

As I understand it, scanner friendly films have no rough retouching surface or other such "pebbly" surfaces. This improves the scan quality by giving the scanner a smooth surface to act on.

PE

With CN film I'm getting newton rings in my enlarger, because the emulsion is so smooth. Only the glass on top is AN.

Im also having problems in the highlights when camera scanning, probably a similar effect. And of course newton rings are there as well. I wish the emulsion was rougher, like b/w.

 

[Helge]

Newton rings would be fixed with appropriate liquid in the holder.
Isn’t the highlight problem simply overexposure?

 

[mondoman712]

I use darktable to invert and edit my scans, I don't think it has as many auto buttons as lightroom and negative lab but it does the job.

 

[neilt3]

I use darktable to invert and edit my scans, I don't think it has as many auto buttons as lightroom and negative lab but it does the job.

When you invert it does it also remove the orange mask ?

 

[GLS]

When you invert it does it also remove the orange mask ?

You should be able to pre-neutralise the orange mask by picking the white balance off it.

 

[pekelnik]

Sorry if this has been mentioned, I skipped the later few pages of this thread (and in fact I haven't visited this forum in what looks to be about 5 years). There are other (free) imagemagick based tools for inverting negative scans, for instance negfix8: https://sites.google.com/site/negfix/ and negative2positive: http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/negative2positive/index.php

My workflow is in general scanning a 24bit tiff with a V600 as a positive with no adjustments in epson scan, and then inverting them using one of the two scripts. I'm still tweaking it to get a single repeatable process, but this is also not easy. I think that's because the response of the V600 isn't linear towards the ends of the spectrum and that creates color casts depending on how exposed the images are. I actually installed lightroom and NLP and compared it, but I got better colors out of negfix8 and my standard process is done on Linux with GIMP so I was pretty happy I didn't have to move it over to a windows machine with Lightroom/PS which I both dislike.

And doing a simple divide by orange and invert is not really working for me..

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Sorry if this has been mentioned, I skipped the later few pages of this thread (and in fact I haven't visited this forum in what looks to be about 5 years). There are other (free) imagemagick based tools for inverting negative scans, for instance negfix8: https://sites.google.com/site/negfix/ and negative2positive: http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/negative2positive/index.php

My workflow is in general scanning a 24bit tiff with a V600 as a positive with no adjustments in epson scan, and then inverting them using one of the two scripts. I'm still tweaking it to get a single repeatable process, but this is also not easy. I think that's because the response of the V600 isn't linear towards the ends of the spectrum and that creates color casts depending on how exposed the images are. I actually installed lightroom and NLP and compared it, but I got better colors out of negfix8 and my standard process is done on Linux with GIMP so I was pretty happy I didn't have to move it over to a windows machine with Lightroom/PS which I both dislike.

And doing a simple divide by orange and invert is not really working for me..

The color casts you’re seeing are actually the result of the three channels of the negative itself not having the same gamma. If you just invert and white balance the mask out you’ll still have color casts that progressively get worse with more density because each emulsion color has a slightly different characteristic curve and gamma that you have to account for, which in my experience, most tools don’t do a particularly good job with, and don’t give you a particularly easy way to deal with in the UI.

 

[jtk]

#1 the scan isn't complete until it's post-processed...which involves personal judgement.

#2 try NIK. Its' better for many people than LR for post-processing because it offers a "ring-around" from which to select and do any further tweaking. It's great with neg color film. .

 

[pekelnik]

The color casts you’re seeing are actually the result of the three channels of the negative itself not having the same gamma. If you just invert and white balance the mask out you’ll still have color casts that progressively get worse with more density because each emulsion color has a slightly different characteristic curve and gamma that you have to account for, which in my experience, most tools don’t do a particularly good job with, and don’t give you a particularly easy way to deal with in the UI.

Where does the different gamma came from? The scanner or a different response of the film? (I guess because different color layers are at different depths?)

 

[Photo Engineer]

The three layers are supposed to have the same gamma by design. Manufacturing and processing problems introduce any mismatches you may observe.

PE

 

[Ted Baker]

Where does the different gamma came from?

The different gamma occurs when the scanner does not match spectral characteristics of the designed print stock. i.e. normal colour paper.

Sometimes the manufacturer or software has a linear matrix to convert the spectral response of the scanner to match what it should be, if you doing the inversion manually you will need to it yourself. BTW This is part of what is included in negative lab pro, though it may not be described as such.

As PE says the film is designed to have same gammas as the print stock sees the film, except for any defects in the material.

The three layers are supposed to have the same gamma by design.

i.e. when you conventionally print these films a neutral once balanced correctly with filtration should remain neutral though out most of the films density range.

 

[Ted Baker]

There are other (free) imagemagick based tools for inverting negative scans, for instance

And this one https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/scantools-a-few-tools-to-help-with-film-scanning.161917/

I started this last year, and have left it be for a while I took some pics... I hope to add a release later with results of my work for colour.

 

[PhilBurton]

#1 the scan isn't complete until it's post-processed...which involves personal judgement.

#2 try NIK. Its' better for many people than LR for post-processing because it offers a "ring-around" from which to select and do any further tweaking. It's great with neg color film. .

Which individual NIK product? The bundle is pretty pricey.

 

[pekelnik]

And this one https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/scantools-a-few-tools-to-help-with-film-scanning.161917/

I started this last year, and have left it be for a while I took some pics... I hope to add a release later with results of my work for colour.

Thanks! I tried using your inversion, although I did not use your scanning method as I don't have the time for that right now.
I tried inverting a photo both with default orange layer and with a layer that I previously sampled as a mid point in epson scan (this tends to help and I got it from NLP manual):

$ ./invertscan -fb 0.796,0.498,0.373 -dmax auto neg/img4775.tif ./img4775d.tif
Normalised values are:
max min
Red: 0.749874 0.293736
Green: 0.475074 0.129061
Blue: 0.299794 0.0478828
using calculated FB: 0.796 0.498 0.373
log() values are:
base shadow DMax
Red: 0.0990869 0.0259248 0.432956
Green: 0.302771 0.0204681 0.586434
Blue: 0.428291 0.0948859 0.891529
using auto calculated dmax
dmax: 0.891529
scale: 19123.3
1 image files updated
inverting: ./img4775d.tif​

This left the image rather low contrast and quite blue.

$ ./invertscan -fb 0.525,0.529,0.514 -dmax auto neg/img4733.tif ./img4733b.tif
Normalised values are:
max min
Red: 0.54049 0.110246
Green: 0.537621 0.138949
Blue: 0.529473 0.0339055
using calculated FB: 0.525 0.529 0.514
log() values are:
base shadow DMax
Red: 0.279841 -0.0126284 0.677796
Green: 0.276544 -0.00702055 0.5806
Blue: 0.289037 -0.0128807 1.18069
using auto calculated dmax
dmax: 1.18069
scale: 12825.3
1 image files updated
inverting: ./img4733b.tif​

This was somewhat more acceptable but rather purple.

Am I doing something wrong?

 

[Ted Baker]

This left the image rather low contrast and quite blue.

That to be expected the output will have a gamma of 1.0 so once you increase the contrast or created a curve that you like if will have the contrast you have chosen. The image still needs to be white balanced but that is a trivial operation, that can be done with a white balance dropper.

This will result in a pretty good image.

That version of the code does not have, matrixes that I created that I mentioned in an earlier post. I will release that later this year.

 

[jtk]

That to be expected the output will have a gamma of 1.0 so once you increase the contrast or created a curve that you like if will have the contrast you have chosen. The image still needs to be white balanced but that is a trivial operation, that can be done with a white balance dropper.

This will result in a pretty good image.

That version of the code does not have, matrixes that I created that I mentioned in an earlier post. I will release that later this year.

Which individual NIK product? The bundle is pretty pricey.

Even though I'm no longer working my time is valuable. I first got NIK when it was free. I do hate the bundle but I think it has no rivals.

If precise color match is desired recognize that the closest anybody will come to that is still a judgement call after post processing.