Deuteranopia Vision Colorblind correction?

Sfjessy wrote: “the color is so off that I wouldn't have the time, patience or consistency to correct thousands of them. Does anyone know if there are presets or other aids in photoshop or lightroom”

Photoshop and Lightroom have several potential aids. Lightroom has Auto White Balance, and Photoshop has Auto Color. But how much they help is going to depend on what’s wrong with the color in the film scans. If they were scanned properly and the only problem is white balance, then either of the commands above should get it done. But if the scans are off for other reasons, including clipped channels, uneven fading due to poor film processing or age, automatic corrections aren’t going to help.

I scan my color negatives using the VueScan software that was mentioned. It has additional options including profiles that help match specific film types, and options like Restore Colors, and Restore Fading. Again, none of these are magic bullets, but they can be useful tools when some film has specific color problems.

If the bad color is because of age-related fading, sometimes you can address that by manually adjusting the RGB curves in Lightroom or Photoshop, or shifting channels in Photoshop. In the worst case scenario where color has faded unevenly across a frame, you would then have to go in and manually apply gradient masked or brushed corrections in Lightroom or Photoshop.

To get a better answer in this thread, it would be good to see a few example images. If you’re lucky, maybe they just need a white balance adjustment.

Scanning negatives having a lifespan of 40 years will have lots of challenges particular with varying colour shifts due to ageing. Even if there is an obvious neutral area to click on does not guarantee the other colours will render accurately.

I would recommend that you get a suitable scanner software package one that I have used from time to time over 10 + years is called VueScan from Hamrick dot com. Lots of tools available and good support.

There is a free trial so you can check out. 

If you have major color issues I would expect this to be initially a scanner problem. If so, that may be worth investigating/fixing before you scan 40k negatives.  It may even be cheaper to buy a new scanner than spend the hours addressing it.

As for LR are you hoping to apply a batch adjustment ("increase exposure of all scans by one stop") or something else?

If you can scan a grey card using the same hardware, then you ought to be able to correct all of the photos using the same correction. (By the way, just trying to rule out the obvious, scanning negatives ought to produce horrible reversed colors, that's not the problem is it?)

Can you post a typical example image?