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We have taken pictures with a camera of a bunch of color negative film. I have inverted them and attached a couple. Normally they come out looking good but this film is older and looks bluish. The colors don't look right and we are trying to color correct them but haven't been able to get them to look right.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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Pretty good, actually. I used just a Curves adjustment layer. What my panel looked like:
(Note that the red channel is right underneath the green channel and has almost exactly the same settings.)
And what the result looked like (I cropped out the edges because they were distracting me):
Things I always ask myself when I look at an image like this: Does that look like concrete at the shopping center? Is that dirt or is that a road?
I noticed there's still some blue haloing going on around the edges (probably from capture). It could be remedied by pulling down the blue channel some more but not without upsetting the balance of the rest of the image. It really is a delicate balance. (Which is why it's so important to have the image as uncontaminated as possible.) It still looks a little too warm to me but I'm my own worst critic, so... xD
Also, use at least 16-bit color depth when you can throughout the process until output as it can help with color correction.
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The Color negative preset in the Curves panel will often produce a good result, or at least a good starting point for further tweaking. But some negatives can be very difficult to color correct.
You can also try to invert the image in the scanning software, if it is an option.
Some scanning programs do quite good inversions, (FlexScan for Imacon and EpsonScan), while others do not.
I have not had much success with VueScan.
What scanner and scanning program do you use?
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Here's another method, which involves sampling the color of the orange mask, and using it for color correction on a layer. Sometimes this works better than the Color Negative preset.
Someone posted this method here some years ago, but the post vanished in the upgrade to Khoros, so I can't give credit. (if the author is reading this, thank you!)
I created an action that I thought I'd attach here, but it turns out to be impossible to attach .atn files.
So here's a screenshot from the Actions panel, as well as the Libraries panel, where I keep color samples of a clear area from different film types. Before running the action, the foreground color should be set to the corresponding color sample. Ideally, the color sample should be from the scan you're working with. Sometimes using a color sample from a different film type than the one you're using works better.
It can be useful to add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to the action.
The Levels adjustment layer isn't strictly necessary, but is sometimes easier to use than Curves.
The initial result doesn't look all that good, but a few tweaks to the composite and green channels in the Curves adjustment layers produce this result:
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These pictures look like they were taken with an Aerial camera; what is the size of the negatives, and do they have orange masking? Many aero negative films did not have the masking. Boy, the detail you could get out of those!
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The negatives are 9" x 9". The film looks blue and the invert of the image looks orange. I didn't do any masking to it.
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If these are raws from the camera, you might be more successful doing this at the raw scan stage, in ACR/LR using this third party plug-in for handling the orange mask which is the issue here:
https://www.negativelabpro.com/
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Could you post a non-inverted version?
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