scanning colour negatives

[nwilkins]

hello there. I have been scanning black and white negatives with a V700 for a while now and have a process that works well for me - I turn off autoexposure and sharpening and use the histogram adjustment in Epson Scan to make sure that there is no black clipping, no highlight clipping, and set the midpoint on the low contrast end of things to keep lots of mid tone detail. What I end up with is a tiff file which has very low contrast, but it ensures that the scanned image has as much information as possible from the original negative. I figure this gives me the most options in terms of how I want to treat the picture - I use LR to edit the tiff files.

I am wondering if I need to do anything differently for colour negatives? Is there a downside to using my approach with colour? Can I just use the black point/white point/midpoint adjustments in Epson Scan as I have been doing, or do I need to do something else due to the separate colour channels? Would I be better off using Silverfast SE for colour?

I know there are a thousand scanning methods out there, but I'm looking for a nice simple one to provide me with a tiff file which has as much information as possible so I can edit freely in LR.

Thanks in advance!

 

[glhs116]

There is some nice information on this in this very forum if you have a look around. Basically, no different apart from you will need to set endpoints for each colour channel individually since there is a strong difference in the brightness of the three colour channels on colour negative film. Blue will probably need over two stops more exposure than red to capture the full range on all colours. You can still get a good conversion if you don't equalise but you will be throwing away a lot of information in the green and blue channels.

Sam

 

[nwilkins]

thanks a lot Sam - that is exactly what I needed to know.