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tylerr61376702
Participating Frequently
January 11, 2022
Question

Color Negative Film Color Correction

  • January 11, 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 5058 views

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.

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

Semaphoric
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 12, 2022

Could you post a non-inverted version?

TheDigitalDog
Inspiring
January 12, 2022

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/

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"
Semaphoric
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 11, 2022

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!

tylerr61376702
Participating Frequently
January 12, 2022

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.

Chris 486
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 11, 2022

I color correct to what I htought was a good start and attached my work file so you can see my adjustment layers. Hope it helps!

 

 

War Unicorn
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 11, 2022

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.

tylerr61376702
Participating Frequently
January 12, 2022

 I used our hi res scanner and got the attached image. The images above look close but not quite correct. We would use the scanner on all the images but it would be too time consuming.