Digital photography is getting better and better, and with the advent a few years back of the affordable DSLR, like the Nikon D40, professional grade digital photography is within the reach of most anyone who really wants it. Of course just buying a digital camera won't make you a better photographer, but the results on a good camera leaves the old film negative experience in the dust...for most people anyway.
But, there are still an awful lot of film negatives hanging around. Most of the time if you want a good copy of one of those your best bet is to have a good color enlargement print made, but sometimes you may want to scan it instead. If you have ever tried that one, you may have been baffled by the results. The first time I ever saw this tried was during the Atlanta Olympic Games. The Prepress house I was working for had a contract with some big name magazine to scan hundreds of frames of Olympic photography that were shot each day at the games. For some reason the Photographer(s) in question used only color negative film (I would guess because you can get faster ISO speeds with color negative film than with slide film and they were trying to capture the action shots). It took a lot more work than anyone had guessed for the lead scanner operator to figure out a decent process to handle these things, and the results never did look quite right. I didn't know enough about it at the time to do more than watch (and Photoshop wasn't even a blip on the radar screen of serious prepress in those days – everything was Scitex). But the results I get now are better than what they got then.
You might think that you could just scan yourself a decent scan of the negative and invert it to positive with Image>Adjustments>Invert in Photoshop. If you do, you will get something that looks like this.
This is a photo I took years ago of my nephew's hermit crab. They happened to have a handy collection in the yard of organic debris (i.e. stick and leaves) that I brought the crab out to, sprayed it all down with a water bottle, and took a few decent photos. The problem is a thing called the "orange mask." I do not know much about what the orange mask actual is or the reason for it, but it is a part of the chemistry of all color negative film. The process of making color prints takes the orange mask into account, and if you want to scan your color negatives you will too.
One solution I have seen recommended is to invert the negative image in Photoshop and then perform Image>Adjustments>Autolevels.
This actually can work pretty well, as you can see, depending on the exact image. You must consider that the operative word is "auto," which means it cannot evaluate the particular image you are looking at like a live human being can. The other issue is that different film manufacturers each use a different orange mask, so auto-whatever cannot figure that out for you. If the image happens to be a good match for the parameters of this function, good. If not, not so good. Most images I have tried are not. This happens to be the first image I ever tried Auotolevels with, and it gave me more hope for the utility of this method than proved to be warranted. As I tried to convert other images I was not too impressed with the results. As I figured out what I was doing I found that I could still do better, even when Autolevels did OK. After all, Photoshop can do a lot of nifty things, but it doesn't have a "Care" button.
This is what the image looks like after I custom converted it in Photoshop. As noted above the Autolevels function didn't do too badly on this one, so the difference from there to here isn't going to make you run around the room with your arms in the air in astonishment. You can see however that the custom conversion has greater depth and better overall color. The range of the image is greater, the midtones are fuller and the highlights are less blown out. If you were going to make a good print or use it for process color (if you really cared in other words) you would definitely want to use the custom conversion. If you just want to stuff a jpeg on your laptop to show Grandma next Thanksgiving, the Autolevels version might be ok (since Grandma doesn't really care about hermit crabs or good photography anyway). If you want to make people wonder if there's something wrong with you, you might just Invert it and stop there. Or even hang up the un-inverted negative for that matter.
So what do you have on hand that needs more expertise or care than you have?
Photoshop • Museum Quality Photo Restoration • High-end Retouching & Photo Manipulation • Illustration • Logo Design • Graphic Design
fireofgodimaging@gmail.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment