Note:- Tiffs file G-drive link at bottom.
I recently sent some old developed negatives to a lab to be scanned and some of them turned out with green hue. I am able almost able to correct that hue even with my ameteur skills but in one roll there seems to be color glitches which seem digital. I believe those are digital because that color glitch/fade are covering around the edge of the block of walls in in the background. I have marked that image with Name “A”.
In some other photos there is similar color glitch but I am not certain that’s digital. In images D and E there is semicircle at the extreme left formed with group of small tiny circles. Both D and E are from totally different rolls and shot at time difference of almost an decade.
In image F, there are different colors over deep scratches which I believe is where scanner used Adobe ICE to correct them and I don’t know if it is normal or not,
In image G, the faded colors inclding over the scratches are also following along the branch of tree on the right side which seems digital.
In most of the stripes/rolls that I gave for scanning there isn’t problem like that except for a green tint on 1/3 of films which is correctable.
I have no good knowledge of photoshop and I want to make sure these negatives are scanned properly.
Can anyone help me verify the reasons of these errors? Is this just only because of incorrect color settings and is there some other problem?
These are scanned in 16 bit with Noritsu hs-1800 set to highest resolution.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19V90JiE5ATCa5SgU6zLVSWSIdshRS929
Downloaded your images and tried a few things. The settings I applied are in the presets that are added here: SwissTransfer.com - Envoi sécurisé et gratuit de gros fichiers
(beware, the link will time out on August 8th, 2022)
Download the archive and unzip it, then import the presets into Lightroom.
If you then apply e.g. Preset A to image “A”, you can check what you can do in Lightroom to change the appearance of the image. The presets are not meant to solve the problems, but to give you a few directions about what you could try to do, to manage the colours.
Here’s what I got with a few tweaks:
For future scans: If the originals are negatives, don’t have them converted by the lab. Negative Lab Pro can take care of the colours, which is not to suggest that things will be perfect from the start, but you’ll not be hindered by something that might have been added by the lab’s processing.
Hi,
Those images do look like old, faded négatives due to age, low quality initial development, perhaps bad conservation conditions (temperature, humidity, moistering).
If you look at the histograms in PS or LR or your favourite software, you should observe that it is much less wide than usual: they have lost a huge amount of information including Color’s and luminance and details.
This is common after 20 or 30 years and continues to degrade. Some high quality films do keep most of their details as long as they have been well stored.
So I would say that nothing is a digital glitch there but the normal results of scanned faded negatives.
You may only follow Digitizer’s advices above so as to try improve the results.
Indeed, they do - and I often resort to B&W in such cases.
Nevertheless, some kind of “normal, but old” colour can be restored with some extra effort.
Yes, you are right, but, as far as I correctly interpret our friends initial request, he was not really looking for a solution but for a diagnostic : «What’s wrong with those specific tiff files got from the lab?».
It looks to me that there are no problems in the scans, but there are many in the original negatives which are indeed deteriorated.
Therefore, there are no reasons to suspect a bad work from the professional lab which he may continue to work with, but now knowing that scanning some of those old negatives will not directly produce acceptable results. Those faded negatives, to produce nearly acceptable results, will require quite a lot of color and exposure corrections using a suitable post processing software, or will require finding a lab able to do the job which is more a kind of restoration work.
Indeed, the scans might be perfectly done, but as we cannot see the negatives, we must consider issues in every link of the chain. That being said, the negatives look old and deteriorated and if they are, a positive scan (that provides a negative image) might provide a better starting point. In order to find out, @Push9797 might try to get positive scans that we can compare.
If the original shots are transparencies (for projection), a negative conversion could help too, according to this post/thread.
These look like decent scans of very poorly processed or very poorly stored color negatives. I have some old family negatives that yield similar results. Each brand and type of film seems to fade in a different way, depending upon which dye layer(s) fade fastest, or most unevenly.
Heat, moisture, air pollution, light, and radiation all deteriorate film. That is why film producers store original movie negatives in sealed metal cans in underground, temperature and humidity controlled vaults.
My solution to this is not to rely on lab scans, but to scan or copy the negatives with a digital camera and run the “positive images of the negatives” through NLP. If I can’t get the color right, I convert them to grayscale black-and-white and move on.
