New CN inversion method for PS

[Bob Carnie]

I just love how everyone in this thread and in general treat scanning as some kind of black magic or art. All the R&D that revolve around these methods has been published in books and online resources freely up to the early 2000s most notably aim-dtp.net before it went down. Just look and you shall find, I suppose if people want to hitch the dslr-scanning wave for $$$ then that is another matter - I agree with Ralph here.

I have been scanning since 2000 and do not consider it a black magic, but I am really willing to learn new tricks as I am an old dog, I would encourage the OP to help me learn a few new things.

 

[RZied]

Hello Raoul,

The results from this are worse than the previous DSLR scan test I did, but I'm not sure why.
I think there might be color information clipped in the raw file. 400H has quite a strong reddish base, did you use any gels over your flash to compensate for this? If not, that might be the reason why. You don't have to completely negate the base, but just enough blue or cyan to get the channels a little balanced.
I first imported in to LR to get a 16bit .tiff file, I assume the dslr was already set to 14bit raw uncompressed.


View attachment 193836

Oh this is just a perfect color interpretation of the scene. Getting excited with your process. I used colorperfect filter but irests are always unpredictable. In scanning this film, I used a 60mm macro and a flash at a fix distance to achieve uniform exposure: ISO 64 1/250 @ f/8.0 with a diffuser in between to eliminate hot spots.

 

[Adrian Gabor]

Oh this is just a perfect color interpretation of the scene. Getting excited with your process. I used colorperfect filter but irests are always unpredictable. In scanning this film, I used a 60mm macro and a flash at a fix distance to achieve uniform exposure: ISO 64 1/250 @ f/8.0 with a diffuser in between to eliminate hot spots.

Glad to hear that! Try a CTB filter in between the flash and diffuser next time, I have a feeling the result can be improved further.

Progress is good on the action, and I now have a new method for a final CC adjustment that is intuitive and simple to use. Of course, the aim is to get very close from one click, and make no assumptions on what the correct balance is, the user should be the one to set that, just like in printing. That said, the result you see is a straight one click with no other parameters changed.

I still need more testing material to make sure the method works every time, and fine tune it.

 

[Bob Carnie]

Glad to hear that! Try a CTB filter in between the flash and diffuser next time, I have a feeling the result can be improved further.

Progress is good on the action, and I now have a new method for a final CC adjustment that is intuitive and simple to use. Of course, the aim is to get very close from one click, and make no assumptions on what the correct balance is, the user should be the one to set that, just like in printing. That said, the result you see is a straight one click with no other parameters changed.

I still need more testing material to make sure the method works every time, and fine tune it.

With your app . a single click may take it to far, is there a Opacity slider option to back off the correction slightly??

 

[Adrian Gabor]

With your app . a single click may take it to far, is there a Opacity slider option to back off the correction slightly??

That's what I'm working on currently, making it conservative yet still able to provide a good result from one click.
The user 'adjustments' will be controllable with layer opacity, no step of the process is destructive.

 

[Bob Carnie]

That's what I'm working on currently, making it conservative yet still able to provide a good result from one click.
The user 'adjustments' will be controllable with layer opacity, no step of the process is destructive.

Sounds good , very handy for large bodies of negative scan work for quick presentation and evaluation.

 

[Adrian Gabor]

Here is a shot from user bestbefore1978.
One is the result of the action by itself, the other is action + manual CC adjustment based on the middle grey of the color chart.

 

[calebarchie]

Hello Raoul,

The results from this are worse than the previous DSLR scan test I did, but I'm not sure why.
I think there might be color information clipped in the raw file. 400H has quite a strong reddish base, did you use any gels over your flash to compensate for this? If not, that might be the reason why. You don't have to completely negate the base, but just enough blue or cyan to get the channels a little balanced.
I first imported in to LR to get a 16bit .tiff file, I assume the dslr was already set to 14bit raw uncompressed.


View attachment 193836

This just looks odd to me (greens). I suppose it looks like what is; a negative scanned on a DSLR, it seems the OPs method is more absolute colorimetric (?) - colors are "correct" however the character of the film is lost. Here is my take, one 'auto' and another with minor adjustment to the individual rgb gammas, slight contrast curve and vibrance. Even with the OPs previous samples I could of been fooled they were taken on a digital camera with a VSCO preset! Color is largely a matter of taste of course and I'm mainly a B&W guy - life is simpler that way.

 

[Lachlan Young]

This just looks odd to me (greens). I suppose it looks like what is; a negative scanned on a DSLR, it seems the OPs method is more absolute colorimetric (?) - colors are "correct" however the character of the film is lost. Here is my take, one 'auto' and another with minor adjustment to the individual rgb gammas, slight contrast curve and vibrance. Even with the OPs previous samples I could of been fooled they were taken on a digital camera with a VSCO preset! Color is largely a matter of taste of course and I'm mainly a B&W guy - life is simpler that way.

View attachment 193887 View attachment 193888

I think a lot of the so-called 'character' is down to bad scanning and/ or inept colour 'correction'. Colour neg can be deadly accurate in terms of colour reproduction if the inversion is handled correctly, but with an elegant, naturalistic character that digital sensors struggle to match. I find it's vastly easier and faster to get first rate colour with the right amount of 'personality' from neg film & a good scan than from a digital sensor & much fiddling in PS.

 

[calebarchie]

Which do you prefer? I know which one I do, all this is a simple curves layer and levels without any sampling of the mask which could be automated. Its down to interpretation (look re tonal separation grass), do note I did not scan this image but it would be interesting to hear from the photographer.

 

[RZied]

Glad to hear that! Try a CTB filter in between the flash and diffuser next time, I have a feeling the result can be improved further.

Progress is good on the action, and I now have a new method for a final CC adjustment that is intuitive and simple to use. Of course, the aim is to get very close from one click, and make no assumptions on what the correct balance is, the user should be the one to set that, just like in printing. That said, the result you see is a straight one click with no other parameters changed.

I still need more testing material to make sure the method works every time, and fine tune it.

Hi Adrian,

I tested another batch of film but still Fuji Pro 400H with the same setup. I'm sending three versions of this file; one with plain diffuser, the other with CTO using Rosco #3407, and the last one with CTB using Rosco #3204. Here they are respectively:
1. https://d810scan.s3.amazonaws.com/Diffuser_No_Filter.NEF
2. https://d810scan.s3.amazonaws.com/Diffuser_CTO_Rosco#3407.NEF
3. https://d810scan.s3.amazonaws.com/Diffuser_CTB_Rosco#3204.NEF

Kudos

 

[Adrian Gabor]

I think a lot of the so-called 'character' is down to bad scanning and/ or inept colour 'correction'. Colour neg can be deadly accurate in terms of colour reproduction if the inversion is handled correctly, but with an elegant, naturalistic character that digital sensors struggle to match. I find it's vastly easier and faster to get first rate colour with the right amount of 'personality' from neg film & a good scan than from a digital sensor & much fiddling in PS.

I agree.
I'm not going to spend too much time on calibrating my method for DSLR scanning as there are too many variables to account for. If done right however, the results are as good as a scanner and my method will work.

It will be ready soon, it may not work on some edge cases, but even then it gets you very close to the truth, and if not, then it will be another tool to use when all else fails. No method will fix a bad scan or o a scan that has missing data which is relevant to the image.

 

[Adrian Gabor]

Hi Adrian,

I tested another batch of film but still Fuji Pro 400H with the same setup. I'm sending three versions of this file; one with plain diffuser, the other with CTO using Rosco #3407, and the last one with CTB using Rosco #3204. Here they are respectively:

Kudos

Funnily enough, this time the no filter version turned out pretty well, while the CTB one actually ended up being unusable, did you adjust flash power to compensate for the density of the filter? It is not enough to only add it in between the light source and diffuser.
The contrast and saturation are also higher and wackier when compared to scans from regular scanners, but with tweaking, this is usable.

 

[Paule]

Adrian ,
I am keen to get further news on your progress . Currently , I use the ColorPerfect-mechanism for inversion . When your method offers advantages , I will certainly go for it .

Paul

 

[Adrian Gabor]

The first version of the action is now available for sale at my website!

I also wrote a series of articles that will help understand the process as well as any issues that might arise, I recommend reading at least the How To article.
Should anyone have trouble with the action, I will assist them in troubleshooting any issues with their scans.

There are some things changed, most notably there's no more need for a shadow recovery, the new CC method, and a more conservative initial contrast.

Adrian

 

[Adrian Gabor]

I've updated the action to version 1.2 - With a number of fixes and improvements that make the inversion process even better.

One thing to note for now is that the action might not work on non-english versions of PS, I'm working on this and might have separate actions for several languages in the future.

edit: I've identified the issue on Photoshop versions CS5 or older and found a fix. Interface language was not the issue as I first feared.

 

[Adrian Gabor]

I've updated the action again, this time most bugs are fixed and the action is much faster.
I've also included an optional action for B&W inversions from linear scans, it's nothing special but convenient, especially for previewing images and getting a good starting point.

If anyone has more color scans they want to see inverted with my action, I'm happy to do them for you!

 

[bestbefore1978]

This latest version (1.3) works really well, great colour straight away

 

[Adrian Gabor]

The next step will be to make this process available for other image processing software.

I already have a working macro for Affinity Photo, that could be ready soon if there is interest.
GIMP will also be possible once they release their 16bit version.

 

[Jesse_S]

The next step will be to make this process available for other image processing software.

I already have a working macro for Affinity Photo, that could be ready soon if there is interest.
GIMP will also be possible once they release their 16bit version.

The Affinity Photo macro would be great for those of us who are trying to move away from Adobe products.

 

[MattKing]

The Corel Paintshop or Aftershot Pro products would also be excellent targets for your work.

 

[lantau]

The Corel Paintshop or Aftershot Pro products would also be excellent targets for your work.

I agree, I have those two as well as Affinity Photo. Ended up not using Aftetrhot but may one day. I'm migrating away from PSP to Affinity for processing negatives, but may continue general use for both for quite some time. I'll never touch Photoshop, but I haven't been able let go of Lightroom. I'm on version 5 which continues to be fine for me.

There is quite some diversity beyond Photoshop!

 

[Adrian Gabor]

I agree, I have those two as well as Affinity Photo. Ended up not using Aftetrhot but may one day. I'm migrating away from PSP to Affinity for processing negatives, but may continue general use for both for quite some time. I'll never touch Photoshop, but I haven't been able let go of Lightroom. I'm on version 5 which continues to be fine for me.

There is quite some diversity beyond Photoshop!

My thoughts exactly. The Affinity Photo macro is now available (both are included)!

It works just as well, and, at least on my computer, even faster and smoother than Photoshop, especially when adjusting layer opacities.
In terms of the results, both PS and AP provide comparable results, with only minor color balance differences, there is no winner or loser here!

One annoying thing about Affinity is that it never remembers my eyedropper tool setting and always defaults to 1x1, but that's a minor complaint.

edit: Regarding Aftershot - I did look into it, but I most likely will not pursue it unless there's a special request for it.

 

[FujiLove]

I can confirm this set of actions does a great job with colour negatives. I'd say at least as well as ColorPerfect, although I haven't done a side-by-side comparison. I also appreciate how the colour balancing works the same as my enlarger, which is very intuitive for darkroom workers. Easily worth the cost of the download.

Nice work Adrian

 

[Siompa]

Hey! I think this looks promising, I’ve used color perfect but the UI is really bad. Another thing is that I have to get two licenses to use it on my Mac and my pc. I have a pc at home with a 35mm scanner and a MacBook Pro that I bring to my darkroom where there is a flatbed.

Is that the case with your action as well?