Exposure and focus settings when scanning via digital camera

[Steven Lee]

I never tried Colorperfect, but another tool to consider is Negmaster. It gives me similar output to manual inversions, but much faster. Here's a sample of Fuji C200:

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

It's a Photoshop plugin. I don't think it supports Lightroom, sadly.

It works like this. You open Photoshop. Load the raw 16bit/channel LINEAR positive you got from Vuescan in Photoshop. Then, you load Colorperfect (while still in Photoshop) and invert. You can do some adjustments inside Colorperfect (eg making sure you have no clipping at either end of the histogram); once you're happy, you'd then commit your changes. Your inverted image appears in Photoshop. You can then use Photoshop as you'd usually do to prepare your final image (eg remove dust, resize, save to 8bit/channel jpeg).

There's no way to use this program directly on the scanned image?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I never tried Colorperfect, but another tool to consider is Negmaster. It gives me similar output to manual inversions, but much faster. Here's a sample of Fuji C200:

View attachment 326516

Steven: It's hard to analyze a snowy landscape scene to determine if the colors look normal. Do you have a photo conversion with people and generally normal colors?

 

[Steven Lee]

Steven: It's hard to analyze a snowy landscape scene to determine if the colors look normal. Do you have a photo conversion with people and generally normal colors?

Alan, I am not allowed to post photos of family members on the Internet, but here's a few random shots from recent rolls, including an accidental double-exposure. The first two are Portra 160 IIRC, the restaurant is Fuji 400H Pro and the horse is Superia 400.

These are not straight-out-of Negmaster scans. I usually add a touch of warmth and contrast to what it produces.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

They look good. Does it operate on its own or in conjunction with the editing program.

 

[Moose22]

I never tried Colorperfect, but another tool to consider is Negmaster. It gives me similar output to manual inversions, but much faster. Here's a sample of Fuji C200:

View attachment 326516

I have negmaster based on a recommendation here. Not long after, NLP corrected the issue I had with it and I ended up buying it after wasting money on negmaster.

Negmaster is... well, it has been a pain in the ass. A few times I went to use it and it was busted, had to update, which was an ordeal, but initial install was also an ordeal so that makes sense. I think he's changed how you install it again, but I don't know. I dread even starting it. When you DO get it going you end up with a whole bunch of steps to convert what is sort of half-ass job in Lightroom, that you then have to do a bunch of photoshopping to get to look right.

Folks who love photoshop will like negmaster. I hate working in photoshop. Everything Adobe is such a convoluted pain in the ass... I just want to get it done in one program, simply, and not have to deal with opening this and converting to that and whatever the hell is going on to get from one Adobe product to another.

So my initial attempts at using negmaster took way longer than NLP to get results that are fine, but not significantly better. Now I feel like negmaster was wasted money because it left such a distaste, what with being busted every time I tried it after not using it for a couple months. I'll be honest, I haven't tried it since the spring. Maybe it's better now and he's sorted the installers, but last year and the year before it was just a tool to piss me off. I gave up, bought NLP, and have used that since.

 

[albireo]

Folks who love photoshop will like negmaster. I hate working in photoshop. Everything Adobe is such a convoluted pain in the ass... I just want to get it done in one program, simply, and not have to deal with opening this and converting to that and whatever the hell is going on to get from one Adobe product to another.

I use Photoshop. I don't understand your comment. Why is it a convoluted pain in the ass? Why do you need to use more than one product? Which other Adobe products are you referring to? I only use Adobe Photoshop. I need nothing else. I hardly know what Lightroom is for. I use PS to 0.0001% of its capabilities, and only to:

a) call the specialised plugin (in my case, Colorperfect) which will invert my negative
b) remove any dust, adjust black point to taste, crop, resize, save to external hd

That's all.

Personally, I like hybrid photography also because I hate spending hours on the computer. My photo needs to be in the negative, and the key to minimise computer time is to optimise exposure and development, just like darkroom buffs used to do in real darkooms. No amount of advanced Photoshop+Lightroom+Cooltool1+Cooltool2 will turn a turd negative into a great digital image (for my taste, others might disagree).

If I get exposure and development right, it's a 60 seconds job in Photoshop.

If a negative takes me more than 60 seconds to turn into a finished image once it's been digitized, for my taste it was a cr*p negative. Scrap and start over.

 

[albireo]

I never tried Colorperfect, but another tool to consider is Negmaster. It gives me similar output to manual inversions, but much faster. Here's a sample of Fuji C200:

View attachment 326516

I really like this!

 

[Steven Lee]

I use Photoshop. I don't understand your comment. Why is it a convoluted pain in the ass? Why do you need to use more than one product? Which other Adobe products are you referring to? I only use Adobe Photoshop. I need nothing else.

He is referring to Negmaster workflow. It requires you to apply a custom DCP profile to a RAW file before opening it in Photoshop. To apply a DCP profile you have to use either a Lightroom or Adobe Bridge, so Photoshop alone isn't enough.

 

[albireo]

He is referring to Negmaster workflow. It requires you to apply a custom DCP profile to a RAW file before opening it in Photoshop. To apply a DCP profile you have to use either a Lightroom or Adobe Bridge, so Photoshop alone isn't enough.

I see, thanks - apologies I wasn't aware of this.

 

[Moose22]

I use Photoshop. I don't understand your comment. Why is it a convoluted pain in the ass? Why do you need to use more than one product? Which other Adobe products are you referring to? I only use Adobe Photoshop. I need nothing else. I hardly know what Lightroom is for. I use PS to 0.0001% of its capabilities, and only to:

a) call the specialised plugin (in my case, Colorperfect) which will invert my negative
b) remove any dust, adjust black point to taste, crop, resize, save to external hd

That's all.

Personally, I like hybrid photography also because I hate spending hours on the computer. My photo needs to be in the negative, and the key to minimise computer time is to optimise exposure and development, just like darkroom buffs used to do in real darkooms. No amount of advanced Photoshop+Lightroom+Cooltool1+Cooltool2 will turn a turd negative into a great digital image (for my taste, others might disagree).

If I get exposure and development right, it's a 60 seconds job in Photoshop.

If a negative takes me more than 60 seconds to turn into a finished image once it's been digitized, for my taste it was a cr*p negative. Scrap and start over.

No, with negmaster you have to pull it into lightroom, do some fiddling, get a half-baked file, then move that over to photoshop, do more fiddling...

It's work. Too many steps, too much time. WAY more than 60 seconds and a whole lot of screwing around with various settings that I'd expect should already be pretty damned close in lightroom considering it supposedly has profiles for my camera and for many different film stocks. You have to change so much once you get to photoshop, I genuinely don't understand why they bother to call them profiles in the first place, you can just pick one at random and it might or might not be better than the one that, in theory, matches the film you used.

And the third time I had to reinstall some crap or other because the installer broke, I ran out of patience. It wasn't "call specialized plugin" it was "Call specialized plug in, it wasn't there, try to remember where the hell it was hidden, go to the internet and find out everything has changed after some update and reinstall" and an hour later I still haven't converted a single damned negative image.

It's plenty powerful. People get good results. But it is for experienced photo editors, not someone who wants to get it done in 60 seconds.

I haven't used Colorperfect. This was last year's frustrations with Negmaster. I'm glad colorperfect works for you, it sounds like what negmaster wishes it was.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I use Photoshop. I don't understand your comment. Why is it a convoluted pain in the ass? Why do you need to use more than one product? Which other Adobe products are you referring to? I only use Adobe Photoshop. I need nothing else. I hardly know what Lightroom is for. I use PS to 0.0001% of its capabilities, and only to:

a) call the specialised plugin (in my case, Colorperfect) which will invert my negative
b) remove any dust, adjust black point to taste, crop, resize, save to external hd

That's all.

Personally, I like hybrid photography also because I hate spending hours on the computer. My photo needs to be in the negative, and the key to minimise computer time is to optimise exposure and development, just like darkroom buffs used to do in real darkooms. No amount of advanced Photoshop+Lightroom+Cooltool1+Cooltool2 will turn a turd negative into a great digital image (for my taste, others might disagree).

If I get exposure and development right, it's a 60 seconds job in Photoshop.

If a negative takes me more than 60 seconds to turn into a finished image once it's been digitized, for my taste it was a cr*p negative. Scrap and start over.

What negative color film do you use so simply?

 

[albireo]

What negative color film do you use so simply?

The following ones work best for me
-Ektar 100
-Colorplus 200
-Gold 200

The following ones don't work well for me
-Kodak Portra 160
-Kodak Portra 400

One massive factor for simple C41 inversion: C41 development quality. I used to drop my rolls at a local photographer who processed C41 in-house. I could never for the life of me get good colours out of those negatives. I was about to abandon C41. Then I started doing C41 by myself, and when I got bored of that, I started using a larger pro shop.

Well It was night and day difference. Both my self-developed C41 and the pro-developed ones gave me much easier colours to work with.

My theory is that some labs process C41 poorly (poor temp tolerances? imprecise times? Chemistry is overused?) and this results in dominants which I am not able to deal with in my workflow.

 

[GLS]

Do you have samples of Colorperfect results?

Here are a selection of mine:

Yellow in Green by atomstitcher, on Flickr

Three Oaks by atomstitcher, on Flickr

Conversations by atomstitcher, on Flickr

--- by atomstitcher, on Flickr

--- by atomstitcher, on Flickr

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

They look very nice. Good work.

 

[GLS]

Thanks. I find the default inversion ColorPerfect performs is usually already pretty close. You just need to watch the clipping of the highlights and shadows (the default settings always do this too much IMO, to give punchier results). After that some very subtle tweaks of the RGB curves are typically required to get things bang on (I do this in Photoshop's Camera Raw filter). Sometimes some HSL tweaks too.

I am curious to try Negmaster and see how it compares.

 

[Steven Lee]

No, with negmaster you have to pull it into lightroom, do some fiddling, get a half-baked file, then move that over to photoshop, do more fiddling...
It's work. Too many steps, too much time. WAY more than 60 seconds and a whole lot of screwing around with various settings

Moose, maybe you need to revisit your approach to scanning in general. Scanning is a digital simulation of printing. This is not "fiddling with half baked files". It is a creative process, the other half of making a photograph covered by Ansel Adams in The Print. Expecting this to take less than 60 seconds is just bizarre.

Your negative is not some kind of complete work of art, it is almost literally a half-baked intermediate image. You are not done. You have to decide on final color palette, and shadows/midtones/highlight balance. Looks like your problem is not Photoshop. Photoshop is just a digital darkroom simulator. Your problem is color negative film. You may be happier with slides.

@GLS fantastic work as usual. One tip on Negmaster: it is strangely sensitive to digitizing exposure. If you find its default conversions appearing with a consistent color cast across several scans, try increasing the exposure.

 

[albireo]

Expecting this to take less than 60 seconds is just bizarre.

Your negative is not some kind of complete work of art, it is almost literally a half-baked intermediate image. You are not done. You have to decide on final color palette, and shadows/midtones/highlight balance,

I beg to differ. Art is not written in stone. For me, the fun in photography happens before pressing the shutter. What I enjoy in photography is the search of a composition or a particular light pattern.

If one has found how to expose and develop a negative in a way that allows them to spend the least in front of a computer, and one likes the idea of doing this, why not pursue this path?

I have little free time. I work 60-70 hours per week, and the rest is spent raising a 2 years old. Any time I can spare from tinkering with my digitalised negatives is time I can spend out there looking for a picture.

 

[albireo]

Such a beautiful colour palette!

Here are a selection of mine:

Yellow in Green by atomstitcher, on Flickr

Three Oaks by atomstitcher, on Flickr

Conversations by atomstitcher, on Flickr

--- by atomstitcher, on Flickr

--- by atomstitcher, on Flickr

 

[GLS]

@GLS fantastic work as usual

Such a beautiful colour palette!

Thank you both.

 

[Steven Lee]

I beg to differ. Art is not written in stone. For me, the fun in photography happens before pressing the shutter. What I enjoy in photography is the search of a composition or a particular light pattern.

If one has found how to expose and develop a negative in a way that allows them to spend the least in front of a computer, and one likes the idea of doing this, why not pursue this path?

I am not arguing about what is enjoyable and what isn't. I am simply pointing out that expecting a computer to guess what colors palette and contrast level you want from a negative in under 60 seconds is just naive. That's not what CN films are for, and if one is looking for a negative inversion tool which produces pleasant color all the time, that's a recipe for disappointment. That's what labs produce BTW. Despite all that custom-built hardware and massive R&D prowess behind Frontier/Noritsu scanners, their full-auto color is utter garbage. So expecting a PC software built by one dude or a tiny shop to invert color coming from a random Epson or a DSLR is just UNREALISTIC.

 

[albireo]

I am not arguing about what is enjoyable and what isn't. I am simply pointing out that expecting a computer to guess what colors palette and contrast level you want from a negative in under 60 seconds is just naive.

Nobody here is saying one should accept the output of a computerised guess.

What I'm saying is that it is perfectly possible to be able to minimize the time spent going from inversion to obtaining exactly the colours one wants.

With the right workflow and the right tools, 1 minute is not unrealistic.

 

[MattKing]

All of this discussion about digital processing of the results is interesting, and has some relevance, but really should be in its own thread.

 

[Steven Lee]

What I'm saying is that it is perfectly possible to be able to minimize the time spent going from inversion to obtaining exactly the colours one wants.

Maybe I should try Colorperfect then. Both NLP and Negmaster start pretty far from the colors I want, and so did Silverfast and whatever software my Coolscan originally came with.

 

[MattKing]

Folks, "Exposure and Focus Settings" is the thread subject.