Colour negatives - removing orange base colour of film

[toolman59]

I have copied some colour negatives using my digital camera.
What is the best procedure for removing the orange base colour of the film prior to converting them to positives?
Thanks in advance.

[df]

It won't be perfect, but you could make sure that you capture some of the unexposed film in the digital capture then in PSP click Adjust> Brightness and Contrast> Curves. Reset the tool to default, then use the White eyedropper in the Curves tool and click on an area of unexposed film. Once you do this for the first frame you should be able to do this for all others on that roll, but if the camera has to adjust for the exposure of the film this will throw this off, so make sure you have a properly exposed frame of film, use that to meter with, and lock in the exposure.

This does not subtract the orange, red, gray or blue base of the polyester film, but instead neutralizes it for the most part. There is a plug-in but it only works on Photoshop (I've tried it on PSP X3 and X4, it won't let you activate it and remove the watermark in X3 or X4) http://www.c-f-systems.com/Plug-ins.html. Corel doesn't care if it's supported, C-F Systems doesn't care if Corel is supported.

There's also a scanning program that claims to work with camera RAW files. Not sure what camera you have, if it's capable of shooting in RAW, or if it's on the list of compatible cameras. http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#rawfiles You can download the trial version and see if it works. I won't write what you'd need to do because it's sorta long and would be a waste if you weren't going to use it. But do let me know if you'd like to go this route.

[toolman59]

Thanks Dan
Your advice confirms what I tried was basically the correct approach, but I can not get anywhere near a decent result. In the next day or so I will start over again knowing that I am at least on the right path.
I can only shoot in JPEG.

Thanks again for your prompt reply.

Brian

[df]

If you can only shoot Jpeg then you'll be fighting an uphill battle. Jpegs don't normally retain enough information to adjust things like this properly.

[ronzie]

What would happen if you create a layer filled with the sample of an unexposed 'orange' area and then inverted it and added it to the image base?

I haven't worked with layers much in this application but it sounds like that should work.

[wds937]

Try using the Manual Color Correction feature. In recent versions of PSP, it is considered an unused command, so you may have to retrieve it from the Customize feature.

Open the Manual Color Correction dialog, and choose a totally transparent orange area, such as you might find between frames or outside a frame (around the sprocket holes). Left-click this area to choose the Source color, change the Target color to white (255,255,255), and then click OK.

[toolman59]

Thank you everyone, I have made progress using the manual adjustment dialog. This produces images which have been cleaned of the orange base colour, but still need more tuning to get a decent photo, maybe my camera copying will not produce reasonable results, it can only produce 5meg jpegs at best setting.
However, being optimistic, is it possible to apply the settings for one base adjustment to the complete batch of negs from the same roll in one hit?


Brian

[df]

Brian, if you find yourself doing the same things to every image then there are a few ways to apply everything to all images.

1) record a script.
On the Script Toolbar (View> Toolbar> Script if not visible already) click the record button (big red dot in PSP X4). Now do your steps that you want to automate.
Do every step that will be done to all or most images.
Save the script, name it.
If you need to turn a step off you can do that with the Edit Script button (pen and paper icon in X4, quill and paper in previous versions). You can also make certain actions require your input, but not all. The various things will say *not editable* if you can't do anything to it. You can also check and uncheck the steps if you want to disable something.

2) Open an image. Do what needs to be done to the image, then go to the history palette and select the steps you want transferred to other images (click the names of them to highlight them while holding Ctrl or Shift). Now click the Save Quickscript button. You can now use the quickscript on other images and the program will save that quickscript in a temp file. The program can be shut down and restarted if need be and the quickscript will still be there.

3) Open all other images you want edited at the same time. Edit the first one, select the adjustments you want done to the rest of the images, highlight the steps you want transferred, right click and click Apply To All Other Open Documents.

4) Same as 1) except you can now use the script in a batch process. Click File> Batch Process. There's a help button if you get stuck with this. Make sure you check Use Script and make sure it's set to the right script. You'll also want to ensure that the script runs with or without your input as you see it BEFORE you start the batch processing. Whichever way the script is set before you open the batch processor is the way it will run, so if you have the script to ask you for input at every step and you have 15 steps and there's 300 images, you'll be wishing you hadn't done that.

This should get you going.

Side note: having scanned over 800 35mm slides in the past month and not even being a tenth of the way through a pile of slides I can tell you that if you plan on doing much in the way of digitizing slides or negatives a decent dedicated film scanner is worth it. I've done the flatbed thing and have just recently purchased a Nikon LS-2000 and a Canon FS4000US. Both are comparable to each other. Both make a world of difference over my HP Scanjet G4050, which was an improvement over my Microtek scanner, which was an improvement over my wife's Visioneer scanner (which only scanned one frame of film/slide in a pass). I've seen what the Epsons can do and how people talk about them, but if I were embarking on a 35mm scanning venture of any brevity a dedicated film scanner would be the way to go.

[JStanley]

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[toolman59]

Dan
Thank you very much for all your effort, I have printed off your post and over the next few days I will work on this.

JStanley
The film developers in my area will only produce digitised negatives at the initial D&P stage. I am looking at proper film scanning with flatbed or dedicated scanners. The flatbed solution may well be better for me as then I will be able to digitise my 120 B&W negs and slides in addition to all my 35mm items.


Thanks again both.

Brian