I found it best just to bring the raw scan into Photoshop and invert myself. Then, simply setting the end points of the RGB curves appropriately give me the best color I've ever gotten out of film.
With the caveat that there was an expectation that you take the output of the script into Photoshop to fine tune it. The final gamma/contrast settings were something that I think are impossible to automate and need human intervention.
As an example of my personal frustration, the first pic here is colorperfect, and the second is just messing with levels. They both look rubbish to me.
Yes, I'd be interested. I don't know what negfix8 is. Is it a LR3 or Photoshop plug-in? Do you want me to post my linear scan here or send it to you?
Pete
Long time ago I've discovered I do not need it, and now I'm using Lightroom exclusively. The Lightroom has everything I need except for negative->positive conversion. And the Lightroom is faster than PS, at least for me. I think that my script may be useful for people who are deploying similar workflow.
Ahh, I got you. I have access to Photoshop through work, so it represents a no-cost option for me.
If the brightest highlight in the scene is instead a light green, automatically assuming it's bright white isn't going to give you the right color balance.
The big problem I have: color balancing seems to be limited to only to moving along the yellow/blue and magenta/green axes.
If you look at the characteristic curve of a color negative, you see that the RGB layers have different densities for a given exposure, but (roughly) the same gammas. Assuming we can keep the gammas of each layer the same, setting the black point to the right RGB value should take care of most of our color correction. The white point should also be set in conjunction with the same amount of shift. This would cause the RGB characteristic curves to overlay, given use a neutral gray scan and proper color balance. Minor curve adjustments could then deal with mixed lighting or slight gamma differences in the RGB characteristic curves.
I think my problem with LR/CR is that I don't know what the heck it's really doing. Some images, taken in non-ideal lighting, need pretty drastic adjustments in the white balance section, and it's unclear to me what that is actually doing. If it's shifting the RGB curves relative to each other, and not just changing the gammas, then it might do the right thing. I don't know. I'll have to investigate more. Unfortunately, I've got to spend time in PS anyway for dust busting and the like.
I'm working on writing one. Maybe I'll finish it up this weekend. It's a bit too verbose because it documents the twisted trail I followed to arrive there.
How's it coming along?
Pete
It's not that I spend more time post processing. PS is faster for me than Lightroom. Throw in the time and extra effort to invert the scan via your script or something similar, especially a big 4000 dpi scan, and it's even worse for me. I do wish LR had just a couple of tools that PS has (or vice versa), because there are some very attractive reasons for using a program like LR.
I saw the healing tool and it's great for small specks of dust but seemed less than ideal for scratches.
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