Blown out highlights

[nate]

@jiwimo

When scanning in the negatives as positives, I was just setting the histograms/outputs to their max value as I was thinking this would preserve as much detail as possible.

I don’t believe this would help preserve any details… The TIFF should be already 16bit, which will be plenty of bit depth to retain details. Using a histogram adjustment in EpsonScan is just software stretching the existing scanned data.

@jiwimo

When using the white clipping and highlight controls in negative lab pro, it will bring the highlights down, but it will give them a serious colour cast, normally orange/magenta - and there is no more detail underneath.

I’m not sure the problem is “clipping” - if you were to use the clipping indicators in Lightroom (hit the “J” key while in the develop module), it wouldn’t be difficult to check and adjust to remove any actual clipping in the scene.

I think a lot of people expect film to have an “HDR” digital type like because of the high dynamic range of the film – but the HDR digital look is really has more to do with regional “tone mapping” which is not really what high dynamic range looks like… having an actually high dynamic range source will look more boring and low contrast.

See this thread for advise on how to process the film image by processing it multiple ways in NLP and using luminosity masks.

Recovering hilights AKA a dynamic sunset problem

Hey, I’m processing a roll of Portra 400 where I’d like to keep good shadow details but recover some of the amazing sunset. Straight out of conversion, the photo looks like this [Screen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.40.12 PM] So I was like - uhm, those details must sure be blown out. To see what’s hiding there, I tried moving brightness to min [Screen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.40.31 PM] There’s a lot of details, but now shadow details are gone. It did recover the nice blue-ish tint of the sky I tried L…