# Negative image handling



## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 12, 2013)

I've read about everything I can find on the internet, including a couple of older posts here.   Is there anything new on the subject of photographing a negative and then developing it in lightroom.  I can invert the point curve and play with the sliders (almost randomly since they are then rather screwed up, not just reversed) until some times I can get a decent image, but synch'ing that image with another on the same film base does not work very well.   I found one preset on the insider site but it did not work at all (I understand something broke somewhere with 4 for those).   I tried a conversion with VueScan to see what it would do, it sometimes does OK, but it more often does poorly.  I'm looking at a 40 year old Kodacolor that looks really good, and a 10 year old Gold negative that is just horrible.  I do not THINK it faded, I think I just have a bad set of colors.   It would seem like it should be possible to have a profile for each film base that does a decent starting conversion, but I haven't found any.   Is everyone using film/flatbed scanners as opposed to photographing their negatives?    Any presets out there?   Or other tools to make this easier, without (I hope) converting to TIF and doing it there (in 5 times the file size)?


----------



## Jimmsp (Apr 12, 2013)

About 6 months ago I set out and digitized a set old negatives that I had; probably about 200. I built a little light table, and then photographed them with my Canon 60D with an extension tube so I could fill the sensor. I shot them all in RAW.
I had to play quite a bit with the light source before I was happy - but it worked.

To answer your direct question - I found no presets. 
I processed the raw by inverting the tone curve, and basically made my own preset. I then applied this to other shots, and fine tuned them until I like what I saw.


----------



## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 12, 2013)

*Trial and error is not fun*



Jimmsp said:


> To answer your direct question - I found no presets.
> I processed the raw by inverting the tone curve, and basically made my own preset. I then applied this to other shots, and fine tuned them until I like what I saw.


That's unfortunate, it seems like such a great application for Lightroom.  I would think Adobe might use it as a feature, but that said I still want to find some mechanism.   I've found a lot of my problems are from problem negatives.  Some that were giving me real problems with color I took to a local lab, and THEY declared one too degraded to get decent color.  The other they managed to make work, better than I had, but still not great.  So I'm coming to the conclusion that what I'm doing in lightroom is not really wrong, but it is sure not efficient.  The main thing I think I am missing is what to use for the adjustments to make the presents most general.   There are MANY ways to get any given color more right -- temperature, hue, saturation, even highlights -- the sliders do very non-intuitive things when the point curve is inverted.  There should be some general approach.  I've tried (for example) using a white area and then adjusting the R/G/B point curves separately to align the histogram.  That does give me white, but the rest of the image might be green or purple.   So I tried doing it with temperature and tone first (after inversion) - still easy to get white to be white, but still have weird casts.  So what I end up doing is fiddling with everything until I like it -- but then syncing to another shot just makes a mess unless it was the same general scene.   If you have other suggestions, please let me know.


----------



## Jimmsp (Apr 13, 2013)

Ferguson said:


> ..... So what I end up doing is fiddling with everything until I like it -- but then syncing to another shot just makes a mess unless it was the same general scene.   If you have other suggestions, please let me know.



I have nothing else to add. I just fine tuned until it looked good to my eye. As you said, it is an inefficient process - something to do on a snowy evening.
In the end, I think my results were acceptable, but far from really good. But since some of the negatives were 45 years old, I don't think I was far from what the "best that could be expected" was.


----------



## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 15, 2013)

This may be obvious but it wasn't to me until pointed out (Thanks to notes from Jeffery Sward):  BEFORE You invert the point curve in lightroom, use the dropper to set the white balance to the film edge (i.e. unexposed film), AND adjust the white level (only) so that it is just barely not totally white (i.e. the holes are barely visible as over-exposed white).  I.e. do what feels incorrect-- make it washed out entirely, then come back very slightly.  Then invert the point curve and it gives a great starting point on color.  If you invert the tone curve first it is much harder to get these two adjustments right.


----------



## Jimmsp (Apr 15, 2013)

Ferguson said:


> This may be obvious but it wasn't to me until pointed out (Thanks to notes from Jeffery Sward):  BEFORE You invert the point curve in lightroom, use the dropper to set the white balance to the film edge (i.e. unexposed film), AND adjust the white level (only) so that it is just barely not totally white (i.e. the holes are barely visible as over-exposed white).  I.e. do what feels incorrect-- make it washed out entirely, then come back very slightly.  Then invert the point curve and it gives a great starting point on color.  If you invert the tone curve first it is much harder to get these two adjustments right.



Not obvious to me. Thanks for the tip - I will have to go back and try that.


----------



## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 19, 2013)

I thought I would follow up on this a bit.  I've now imaged a couple hundred negatives and slides.  Slides work great, no issue, tethered capture is a great way to do it.

Negatives are a royal pain.  Sometimes the technique works great.  Sometimes it's awful.  I can't find a real pattern but I think it's fundamentally that I am working from old negatives.  But even then no good pattern -- I just imaged a roll of 1974 (ish) motorcross shots, I did as described above to one - it looked great.  I sync'd across the whole role and they all looked great. Not perfect, I might touch some up, but better than the actual prints I found.   Others I have tried for an hour on one image and can't get it decent.  

Now that said, the destructive editors work much better.   CS6 with the above technique is great, since you can set the grey colors as well as white, which adjusts the curves more thoroughly.   The easiest one I've found so far is VueScan; I brought the pro version (not sure if the other would do all this), and what I do now is if I get a bad role, I just let it auto-process them all into small JPG positives, and save them in lightroom with the NEF, stacked on top.  Vuescan's auto-everything works great to resurrect the colors, at least as a first pass (again, some could use touchup, but auto-everything on these really bad negatives invariably comes out usable, and could be touched up.

So if I ever really need to print these -- I'll use Vuescan to do a full resolution version from the NEF, and in the meantime I have a viewable and decent color on JPG on top of the stack.

I sure wish Lightroom would build in an inversion that was smart enough to then leave all the other sliders working correctly -- like the say it works in CS6 (ok, I realize that's because it's destructive editing but I think they could still do that in math if they tried).


----------



## Roelof Moorlag (Apr 19, 2013)

I'm not familiar with this stuff but i remembered reading The Dam Book that Peter Krogh is. He made an good description on dpBestflow.
Mabye this is usefull?
Roelof


----------



## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 19, 2013)

Roelof Moorlag said:


> I'm not familiar with this stuff but i remembered reading The Dam Book that Peter Krogh is. He made an good description on dpBestflow.
> Mabye this is usefull?
> Roelof


 I had seen that before, and the main thing they appear to do differently is use colored filters up front in the capture to provide more headroom in the tone adjustment, essentially to skew the capture in one direction so the slider is more centered when you start and you don't hit the end.    I do not have filters for my lens; I was never a filter user back in the film days and with digital other than polarizers and maybe ND I never saw the need.  But what I did have was filters for the flash, a green and orange that were intended to match the flash to ambient better.   So I tried shooting with each -- on the left you see green, center is none (daylight) and right is orange.  The result is definitely that you get more headroom.   For balancing to white on the border (pre-tone-inversion) the slider is at 2000 (all the way blue) on the daylight image, but at 2300 on the leftmost (with green filter).   So I do indeed get more leeway in subsequent adjustment.  With the orange file as you might expect it just makes the negative base more orange and is worse, and cannot be corrected at 2000 (and here to get this close I clipped the blue and green channels in the tone curve pre-inversion).   So yes, they are right -- but it doesn't solve the whole problem.  I still get negatives that just don't end up with decent colors in lightroom.    
 The first image is these three and what they looked like with no editing other than adjusting exposure.  To give a bit of feel for this, I then did a tone set (eye dropper) in lightroom AFTER the point curve inversion.  And indeed the sale is now white if you look at the RGB values.  But the image has a very bad cast to it.     So I spent a fair amount of time hand adjusting tone, saturation, etc -- all not working as you expect with the inverted tone curve.  This is the best I could get:     Ignore the borders but the colors are better here, but it still has a brown, muted look that looks like some kind of antique (ok, the image is from 1972 +/-).   So finally I ran it through Vuescan with default settings, no editing at all, and got this:    Again, ignore the borders as the bright blue looks a bit funny, but look at the sail colors (especially the tiny sail behind) -- the colors are now trued up and realistic.     There's too much blue in some of the land and water but that's easily removed with some hand editing of the resulting positive image.  Are there slider settings in lightroom that would do this?  Probably, but with none of them working as expected (due to the inverted point curve) it's almost entirely trial and error and I'm finding that when a negative doesn't pop up well the first time with minimal adjustments, it's almost impossible to fix.  But easy in a destructive editor.  unfortunately.


----------



## StuMac (Apr 19, 2013)

I havent done it a lot.....but I scanned then at high resolution (Cannon 5600F) and just inverted them using the features of the scanner. Worked a dream.


----------

