# Grading film scans



## AlexBrandt (Apr 20, 2018)

Hello all,

I recently got back into photography, and chose to shoot 35mm film with a few cameras. I get my film developed and scanned at a lab, receive JPEG files.

I haven't done much grading in LR for analogue images. I was wondering if there some resources blog / article about how to bust use LR for various film stocks.

Thank you,
Alexandre


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## Rob_Cullen (Apr 21, 2018)

Victoria has a great blog exactly on this topic-
Lightroom Raw & Creative Profiles | The Lightroom Queen

And the recent change to the use of Profiles in Lightroom means you can create your own Profiles to suit your film scans.
With a little reading about the SDK I have found that creating Creative Profiles is very easy (even for a 'newbie' to profiles) with the updates to Classic 7.3 and Adobe Camera Raw.
https://adobe.com/go/profile-sdk


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 21, 2018)

Interesting, that's not a question we're asked very often. Essentially it's the same process as editing any camera JPEG, except they already have some grain.


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## AlexBrandt (Apr 21, 2018)

I-See-Light said:


> Victoria has a great blog exactly on this topic-
> Lightroom Raw & Creative Profiles | The Lightroom Queen
> 
> And the recent change to the use of Profiles in Lightroom means you can create your own Profiles to suit your film scans.
> ...



Ok, thank you for the link. I'll check that out.
I can image, this is mostly used to apply looks to camera RAW images.


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## AlexBrandt (Apr 21, 2018)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Interesting, that's not a question we're asked very often. Essentially it's the same process as editing any camera JPEG, except they already have some grain.



Well, that's what I'm wondering.  Images have a limit to which the color grading can be pushed until the colors break apart. I'm sure that limit is not the same from various camera JPEG files and various neg scans. The color sampling and depth of the file will dictate how much we can do with it in post.

Is there a way to see the color sampling and depth of a file in Lightroom ? 
Apart from the histogram, are there any other vectorscope and RGB parade monitors in LR ? 
Is there a way to have a big Histogram window ?


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 25, 2018)

Metadata panel can show things like the bit depth. There's no vectorscope or anything like that in Lightroom.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 25, 2018)

AlexBrandt said:


> Well, that's what I'm wondering.  Images have a limit to which the color grading can be pushed until the colors break apart. I'm sure that limit is not the same from various camera JPEG files and various neg scans. The color sampling and depth of the file will dictate how much we can do with it in post.
> 
> Is there a way to see the color sampling and depth of a file in Lightroom ?
> Apart from the histogram, are there any other vectorscope and RGB parade monitors in LR ?
> Is there a way to have a big Histogram window ?



This is probably obvious but just in case... JPG's are always 8 bits, so there are 256 shades of each of Red, Green, Blue; further almost always (though not necessarily) JPG's are sRGB, which means their 256 shades of each color a more limited range overall than other color spaces like AdobeRGB.

If you are having someone do scans for you, they MAY be willing to do 16 bit TIFF scans in a wide gamut color space.  It may cost more.  It may cost a LOT more as the files are huge in comparison, and they may need more processing time.  Huge files, like 100MB instead of 5MB.  But that will give you more ability to alter colors in post processing, both more shades of each color, and more range.

Some people do their own imaging by taking a macro photo of the negative.  If you do that be sure to use "raw" which is usually either 12 or 14 bits.  Those are not options for TIFF (which are either 8 or 16), but still provide a lot more color possibilities than JPG, and indeed actually provide more color possibility in some ways than TIFF because the color has not really been determined in RAW -- it's part of the raw conversion, so there's more leverage (for want of a better word).  Though photographing negatives brings its own challenges - dust, grain, and a need for negatives to invert which is not well handled in Lightroom.


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## AlexBrandt (Apr 26, 2018)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Metadata panel can show things like the bit depth. There's no vectorscope or anything like that in Lightroom.



Ok, I see. Is there a way to get to Histogram to show in a bigger window ?


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 30, 2018)

Nope. First time I've seen a request for that I think. What do you need a bigger histogram for?


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## AlexBrandt (May 1, 2018)

Ferguson said:


> This is probably obvious but just in case... JPG's are always 8 bits, so there are 256 shades of each of Red, Green, Blue; further almost always (though not necessarily) JPG's are sRGB, which means their 256 shades of each color a more limited range overall than other color spaces like AdobeRGB.
> 
> If you are having someone do scans for you, they MAY be willing to do 16 bit TIFF scans in a wide gamut color space.  It may cost more.  It may cost a LOT more as the files are huge in comparison, and they may need more processing time.  Huge files, like 100MB instead of 5MB.  But that will give you more ability to alter colors in post processing, both more shades of each color, and more range.
> 
> Some people do their own imaging by taking a macro photo of the negative.  If you do that be sure to use "raw" which is usually either 12 or 14 bits.  Those are not options for TIFF (which are either 8 or 16), but still provide a lot more color possibilities than JPG, and indeed actually provide more color possibility in some ways than TIFF because the color has not really been determined in RAW -- it's part of the raw conversion, so there's more leverage (for want of a better word).  Though photographing negatives brings its own challenges - dust, grain, and a need for negatives to invert which is not well handled in Lightroom.



Yes Ferguson. Thank you for the infos. I come from a video background (I'm a video producer)... some of my technical questions my reflect that. I'm pretty severe when it comes to grading. I've spent some time doing that in video and working with pro colorists in studios. I really notice the difference between a properly done job and an amateur approach where colors are pushed in all directions not taking in consideration their limits in the file.

Yep,  the lab scans it for me. And yes they can scan to TIFF at higher rez for additional costs. They do for people who want to have a file for a large artwork print.


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## AlexBrandt (May 1, 2018)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Nope. First time I've seen a request for that I think. What do you need a bigger histogram for?



To see what I'm doing to the colors when grading them with the different tools...
Currently the Histogram is tiny, it's hard to see  what's going on with the R, G and B when playing with curves, saturation and the like.

In Premier Pro for video editing, the different scopes can be opened in a separate window. They can be placed in a 2nd of 3rd monitor for example making it really handy.


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## jnstovall (May 31, 2018)

AlexBrandt said:


> Hello all,
> 
> I recently got back into photography, and chose to shoot 35mm film with a few cameras. I get my film developed and scanned at a lab, receive JPEG files.
> 
> ...


Alex, Please take a look at my process using LUT-based color profiles for converting scans of negatives. It's not exactly what you are asking for, but you can easily get much better results than the lab scans. I also have a post showing a simple setup for digitizing negatives with a camera.
One Click Inversion of Color Film Negatives in Lightroom 
Simple Guide to Digitizing Film Negatives


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## AlexBrandt (Jun 3, 2018)

jnstovall said:


> Alex, Please take a look at my process using LUT-based color profiles for converting scans of negatives. It's not exactly what you are asking for, but you can easily get much better results than the lab scans. I also have a post showing a simple setup for digitizing negatives with a camera.
> One Click Inversion of Color Film Negatives in Lightroom
> Simple Guide to Digitizing Film Negatives



Hey there. Thank you for the links.
I don't have a digital camera to digitalize negatives in any case but thanks.


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