How to shoot color negative?

[indigo]

I am not sure where to post this. I just got my first DSLR so I think I will try to shoot my 35mm color negative film instead of using the KM Dimage Dual Scan IV. I have a Beseler CB7 with the dichroic head. I will remove the head and place it on the baseboard with the diffuser facing up as the light source. I will put the 35mm negatran on top to hold the film. May be I will elevate the negatran a bit to keep the same distance from the diffuser like when it's function in the enlarger. I will mount a tripod head on the enlarger carriage to make it like a copy stand. I will use my 50mm enlarging lens on the bellow so I can get 1:1 magnification. May be a large bellow as a shade to keep stray light from entering the space between the lens and the negative. That should give me a good copy setup and now for my question.
Should I adjust the color of the color head and/or the white balance of the DSLR to make the orange base of the film gray? I will use Photoshop CS2 and how should I invert as well as adjust the contrast to get good image?

 

[Doyle Thomas]

sounds complicated and I see no advantage to this method. Most scanners have a feature for scanning color negs. You scan an unexposed negative to set the mask color (which is different for any given film) and the scanner will remove the mask and invert the image. if you try to remove the mask via color balance at the enlarger or the camera or in PS you will badly skew the color information that you want to keep.

 

[L Gebhardt]

Adjust the color using the color head and the daylight setting for white balance. This will give you an image that can be inverted without major curve adjustments, resulting in cleaner scans. However I have not had great luck scanning color negative films with a DSLR. Some colors just don't come out quite right. But I definitely got better results using a color head than using a plain white bulb.

My method to adjust the head was to include the border in a shot and then adjust the colors to bring the white peak of the histogram so all channels were aligned. It's pretty easy to do with a bit of experimenting. Then adjust the exposure so the peaks from the border are all the way to right an clipped a tiny bit. When you inver this will give you the cleanest highlights.