Topic: It's a good job I love black and white (Scanner Question) !!!

[Late Developer]

Those of you who know me will appreciate what a complete techno-muppet I am. Merely seeing all the menus and bars on Photoshop brings me out in a cold sweat.

Anyway, I'm almost at the point where I'm considering dropping colour work altogether because I just can't seem to get the colours right. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a detail junkie for getting things like colour correct.

I use VueScan and tend to use either Portra (160 and 400) or the Fuji equivalents more often than not.

Anyway, I'm sure I've read somewhere (maybe even on FW, I can't recall) about how to remove the colour cast that results from the orange / brown base of colour negatives. Once I've got rid of that, the slight tweaks that I choose to make to colours, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc. are relatively simple.

I don't want to have to get technical with IT8 charts and all that, just something that will get me 95% of the way to where I want to be.

Can anyone help me, please?

[vicky slater]

i'm the least technical person i know but what i do is just slide the saturation down as far as looks right...usually not quite b/w.... and then do colours etc as you said.
This is obviously way too simple but it's all my brain can cope with :)

[Urban Hafner]

Apparently the base color is slightly different on every roll of film. To counter that you can tell Vuescan exactly what the base color is so that it can remove it. Here's a tutorial: http://benneh.net/blog/2008/04/21/better-colour-neg-scanning-with-vuescan/ . That's good enough for me, but maybe I just don't care enough

Urban

[Late Developer]

Vicky / Urban.

I will try both options but you might just have salvaged what small amount of sanity I have left. I know I could buy all the colour charts / targets and calibrate this, that and the other but I have neither the time, funds nor patience - nor am I doing it for commercial gain.

Therefore, I'm hoping that one or the other (or a combo) will get the job sone. I have some to do later, so I might just post one or two to see how they look.

Cheers and thank you both again.

Paul.

[Pete_R]

As long as you specify you're scanning colour neg film, Vuescan should do a reasonable job of getting rid of the colour cast. You may not get a perfect result and some more tweaking might be necessary to get the correct colour balance but the orange base colour should be removed.

[Francois]

Definitely! Just telling the program you're scanning a negative should get rid of it.
From experience, scanners rarely need calibrating so forget about those IT8 charts unless you want absolute color perfection from your negs.

Believe it or not, the worse problem is usually with monitors! They're most often badly calibrated and the user doesn't know it until he prints or sees his pictures on another screen. To me, the best computer gadget I got is a Spyder. After a proper calibration, I couldn't believe my eyes. Also, LCD panels need to be the correct height to display colors correctly. My screen used to be super yellow until I dropped it by about 1 ½ inch.

There are also things about the environmental light that come into play. I'm planning on moving my desk to a place where light will be easier to control so I can get more even results.

[Phil Bebbington]

I always scan with everything turned off using Epson's own software. I find that most of my scans have to much, magenta, blue and cyan. As a Rule I use hue and saturation tool to bring these back to normal and of course make sure I calibrate my screen on a regular basis.

Oddly, I have more trouble getting black and white scans to please me.

[Paul Mitchell]

Paul, I use Colorneg in my workflow http://www.c-f-systems.com/Phototips.html#completeintegrity this nifty bit of software gets rid of the orange mask and gives me exactly what I'm looking for in a neg conversion. Works brilliantly with B&W too! You do though have to start with a raw (linear) scan. A friend of mine explained his workflow on a recent blog http://benneh.net/blog/2010/09/25/vuescan-colorperfect-a-guide/

Paul

[Jeff Warden]

Paul, I'll be the last to try to talk you out of shooting B&W.  I'm feeling the same frustration.  I just took a few rolls of the new Portras and have had a struggle getting colors I like.  Once I get one image I like, it's hard to get the series to match the colors of the first. 

B&W darkroom printing is so involved that it is a stand-alone hobby, independent of the other hobby of taking the picture.  I feel the same way about color scanning; it's just so complicated that there are no shortcuts to a high quality, repeatable performance.  Like with darkroom printing, you just have to sweat it out if you want the results, or hire someone to do it when it really matters. 

I put a few Portra 400 images on my flicker stream this morning.  I'm just trying to get a good scan with no green tint (that's been my problem), not too much saturation and an approximation of what I remember seeing when I pushed the little button.  I have a ways to go.

I hate scanning, but enjoy darkroom time.  I think I'll go shoot some Tri-X.  Sorry this response was so unhelpful, but at least you know you're not alone.  :-)

Jeff

[Francois]

I'm one to believe that with color work, there quickly comes a time when you just let everything go and simply try an be happy with what you can do without spending endless hours fixing things.

I've tried Vuescan but somehow almost always settle back on Epson Scan with everything off except Digital ICE...

Epson scan has a few technical drawbacks. If you run the standalone version, it won't save 16 bit color tiffs properly (they drop back to 8 bit). But if you run it as a TWAIN, you need to call it from Photoshop (for 16 bit support) and in the image transfer process, it doubles the amount of memory required.

On the other hand, Vuescan does all this directly without the need for "wasted" ram.

[Mojave]

Yep, hue and saturation sliders in ACR are all I normally use. Sometimes I do an adjustment layer for Hue, but thats rare. You should be able to adjust to a color you like with ACR.