I’m scanning through five rolls of film I’ve shot recently. Two of the rolls I shoot in red lighting so the negatives before converting are very cyan. After white balancing of the white border, I get these extreme color shifts coming out green, cyan, and sometimes purple - all over the place here. I recscanned the photos thinking that might help but no success.
The two rolls are doing this same thing while the other three rolls came out just fine. I thought at first it might be the sprocket holes but this issue wasn’t occurring with the three different rolls.
I’ve gone through each of the profiles, rescanned, auto WB in Lightroom, and tried correcting myself in NLP. No success.
Does anyone know what might be causing this extreme color shift?
Setup:
Sony A7Riii
Laowa 100mm 2.8 Macro
Cinestill cs-lite
Vaoli 360 Setup
1/80 Shutter
F8
ISO 100
My first guess is the red lighting. It causes scenes to look almost monochromatic with all other colours absent or at least very subdued. The lack of colours makes NLP go wild because it needs all colours to be able to adjust the converted image for black, white and grey etc.
The workaround here would be to try to convert with settings used on negatives that turned out okay, assuming that the “good” and “bad” conversions were done from negatives taken on the same type of film with both films having about the same colour and density of their orange masks. Note that this is no guarantee that all images will convert to taste, but it might give you a starting point that you can accept or work with more easily. After all, you don’t want to compensate the red light and ruin the feeling and character of the original captures.
You can “transfer” these settings by storing them as a preset in NLP or adding a negative that turned out okay to a collection of images that turn out shifted and sync the settings in NLP.
Appreciate for the idea! Tried this method out and still having issues with extreme color shifts and cyan dominating the image once the conversation has taken place and adding a preset with a “good” converted negative.
…and somehow, this indicates that the lighting might be the cause of your problems.
As for your example: I like the appearance, except for the burnt face. You can fix this by changing the values of the black and white clip settings on NLP’s second tab.
I think I might have found a solution. Changing the ToneProfile to LINEAR GAMMA coupled with the blackclip and whiteclip brought back the original red to some extent and stabilized the image to some extent
Good. NLP needs some playing with. There are many selections and sliders that can be changed and most of them do leave their traces on the target images. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the perfect combinations of settings and even if we think that that’s it, a different negative comes along and asks for another series of tests.
