Aperture/Photoshop Film Scanning Workflow?

Hey folks!

After shooting, developing, and scanning a ton of black and white film, I've decided to move on up to color film—starting with C41 negative film. My first attempts at developing color film have been pretty successful, and scanning has been straightforward, but I haven't had much too luck editing out the orange film base in my editor/organizer of choice: Aperture 3. Every adjustment I would made left the highlights and shadows tinted pink and blue respectively. Pretty aggravating.

After a lot of searching RTFMing, APUG asking and thinking, I decided to try a more robust editor—Photoshop CS6—instead. I figured there would be some shortcut adjustment layer or plugin I could use to remove film base color casts without screwing up my highlights and shadow colors. As it turns out, the "photo filter" adjustment layer does exactly what I need it to: I use it to filter out the film base before inverting colors and setting the black point. I can even make an action out of the invert and photo filter steps and batch edit one roll of film at a time.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that I still want to use Aperture 3 to organize smaller edits, use different proofing profiles, manage metadata, share images, etc. I'm not sure how best to do this. I was planning to scan to TIFF files (with no adjustments made in the scanner software), invert and filter out the film base color in Photoshop, import the resultant PSDs in Aperture for metadata and other adjustments. Does Aperture handle PSD files well? What happens if I want to pop back into Photoshop for advanced edits?—does Aperture copy the PSD, or does it allow you to access the original PSD?

Last but not least: what workflow do you guys use for scanning color negatives?

Note: I've put this thread in the "Image Editing" thread because I'm asking a question about editing scans—not about the scanning process itself.

Set Photoshop as your external editor in Aperture preferences. Import your raw scan into Aperture. Use the external editor function to go to Photoshop for inverting and orange mask removal. Exit photoshop, and work on the resultant image in Aperture.

Downside of this is if you are using Vuescan, which creates DNG files, you don't get the use of Adobe Camera Raw for initial rotating and cropping, which is a convenient feature. But not a loss at all, really, since Aperture's crop and straighten tools are so easy to use.

I scan negatives in vuescan as negatives (letting the scanner invert the image) with out any curve adjustments (high and low set to .01) at 16bit per channel, and save the image as .dng. I also use multi sample (4+), multi exposure and IR cleaning (medium). From there the image is often close to where I want it (sometimes it will be flat, have a slight cast or suffer some other easily remedied aspect). I open the file in Camera Raw and if needed make small changes (exposure, shadow or highlight recovery being a couple useful tools) that are more easily accomplished in it than other applications. I do not color correct or adjust contrast or density in CR. Within photoshop I do color correction, density and contrast in an adjustment layer, spot the base of the image directly and save as a PSD. For me this process is fast effective and keeps the original .dng as well as the base image in the psd file intact should I decide to make changes in the future.

I do close to what jd does above. I scan with Vuescan, then go directly into Lightroom (sorry PC based here), then Photoshop for mostly touching up.

Rereading your post though, it's seems to me that you have your post processing methods down pretty well. Let me tell you lazy I am.....with RAW I strictly use Lightroom to adjust the basics and correct 90% of what needs to be corrected there, then use Photoshop to play with all the little bad things I want to get rid of. If I get lazy and shoot JPGs, then right to Photoshop I go. Being more lazy than not as of late, I got a Lightroom/Photoshop plug-in called Perfectly Clear at "automatically" adjusts color balance, contrast, blah, blah, blah. Well, for me, 99% of the time, what it does is good enough. So when using RAW in Lightroom, apply plugin, fine tune maybe, off to Photoshop for the end. JPGs.....open them in Photoshop, apply plug-in, then fix the bad parts and off to the printer we go.

So in a long way what I am trying to say is, if your getting the results you want and can live with moving this and that back and forth from Aperature to Photoshop and back again......your good to go. I would advise that unless you feel there is a noticable loss of photo quality you can see moving stuff around like you are, don't worry about it. If you can really control Photoshop as you are indicating you can......you have 99% of it made. You may be "over thinking" this.

Bob E.

I've had only limited success with Vuescan's color negative invert/correction. I can usually do it better (or at least as good) myself in Photoshop. On the other hand, I also have Silverfast 8, and I find its invert/correction system is far more likely to give me an accurate enough result to go right into Aperture without needing Photoshop. So for color, if I'm in a hurry, I'll batch scan with Silverfast, including invert/color correct, then import directly to Aperture. Photoshop is my external editor in Aperture, so I can always drop back over to it as needed.