my daughters

timo832000 · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 544 Location: Germany / Cologne

My daughters.

Leica R5 + Summicron-R 2/90 Portra 800, self scanned with NEX 5n an EL-Nikkor 80.

#1

#2

best regards

Timo

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

Excellent! Very nice for images scanned with a digital camera from negatives. I find Portra to be very well behaved, however, which perhaps helps some.

Tell me, did you follow any special process in doing your negative conversions? If so, I'd really like to add your process to my ways of doing it, which tend to be various depending on emulsion.

timo832000 · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 544 Location: Germany / Cologne

Thanks for you comment.

My workflow is still under construction and far away from beeing perfect.
At the moment I use a led light table to light the negativ and my nex 5n with the EL Nikkor und some extension tubes as "scanning device".

1. The raw file is importet to camera raw, where an eye-matched white balance is applied (the digital image of the negative should look like the original witch is laid up on the light table).

2. After loading the image in PhotoShop CS 2 I apply a simple action I craeted to remove the color mask of the film and to convert the image into a usable positiv. The action does:

- convert the image into CMYK-color mode (16 bit)
- open the channel mixer
- take channel magenta, apply constant -33%
- take channel yellow, apply constant -66 %
- convert back to RGB (16bit)
- invert the image

3. Setting final adjustments depending on film / personal preferences
often "auto tone" gives nice results, you could also export the image into lightroom.....

It does not work equally good on every film or every image, thats why IÂ´m still working on it. My aim is to archieve more constant results.
Do you have an idea how to optimize ?

Best regards

Timo

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

I'm afraid I don't have any set methods for optimization. I haven't gone to the trouble you have in removing the masking. I've just used Photoshop's negative invert feature and then tweak from that point forward. I've found that I can get decent results doing this with a standard Kodak sort of Kodacolor emulsion or Fuji Superia. But I've never been able to achieve a satisfactory result with Ektar. The converted image always has way too much cyan. Maybe the step you're taking to remove the masking will help with eliminating the excess cyan.

I also use Paint Shop Pro quite a bit. With it, I do the negative inversion and then select a color fade correction option it results that often -- or almost always I should say -- corrects the image such that it looks really good, requiring few additional steps -- maybe a slight boost in curves or saturation. But PSP doesn't handle Ektar any better than Photoshop does.

I've never tried it with Portra -- but I'd like to one of these days. I'l bet Portra will work well. It sure does with the process you've developed.