How to digital scan a color negative film with a DSLR

[fatihayoglu]

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Hi all,

 

I am fairly successful on converting my TX400 films into digital with a Nikon DSLR and Macro lens. Its as simple as convert gin the RGB curve and adding some contrast etc.

 

However I am not quite sure if the same method works for Portra400 films.

 

Could you please enlighten me or show the right paths?

 

PS I use CO11 for RAW processing.

 

Cheers,

 

Fati

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[philipus]

Have a look at the discussions over at RFF.

 

br

Philip

 

Hi all,

 

I am fairly successful on converting my TX400 films into digital with a Nikon DSLR and Macro lens. Its as simple as convert gin the RGB curve and adding some contrast etc.

 

However I am not quite sure if the same method works for Portra400 films.

 

Could you please enlighten me or show the right paths?

 

PS I use CO11 for RAW processing.

 

Cheers,

 

Fati

[Martin B]

I found digitizing color negative film with a digital camera challenging when it came to the white balance adjustment. There are several ways described online how to get this as accurate as possible, and I wasn't fond of any of them. The easiest and IMO best way is to use the black and white point selection tools in PS and adjust saturation afterwards in addition manually. Still the results are sometimes not that satisfactory.

I gave up on digitizing color negatives with cameras and vested into a decent scanner instead which comes with a software (for example SilverFast 8) allowing to automatically adjust the white balance correctly that not much PP is needed. I was unable to achieve similar good results with the manual white balance process in PS. 

[adan]

The main problem with digitizing color negs is the orange color mask. Which is there for technical reasons when making direct darkroom prints (having to do with the transmission curves of the color dyes in the film, and the response curves of the silver in the paper), but a royal pain with digitizing.

 

The main deal is that the orange mask is just that - a mask. It is not a consistent color across the whole image like a filter, but changes depending on the actual color recorded from the subject (since it is made from the same dyes as the image, if the dyes are used to create "picture," they are no longer available to make the orange background). So it can be white-balanced in one place, and still mess up the color in other places.

 

Scanners generally have pretty good software that "understands" how to fix the color from a color negative (sometimes). Cameras do not, since they are intended for photographing "from life." (The one exception so far may be the Nikon D850 with its "Negative Digitizer Mode" which presumably incorporates some of the same correction algorithms scanners use, since Nikon did make excellent film scanners for 15+ years.)

 

A bit more technical detail on removing the orange "color masking" here (a site for digitizing motion pictures, which are generally shot on color neg film): https://www.filmshooting.com/scripts/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24780

 

An additional difference between color (dye) negatives and B&W (silver metal) images is that the color films can be used with scanners' dust-removal capabilites (ICE), which won't work with opaque silver grains. If you can't remove dust automatically at all (as with TX400), then cameras (with no ICE) do as well as scanners. But with color dye images, scanners with ICE have a big advantage in speed, since you do not have to clone out all the dust specks afterwards.