Is there an ideal light source for old emulsions. It seems like we should separate the density record in the film from the color of the (faded) dyes. Of course the camera has filters on the sensor for color separation. Has anyone experimented with a dichroic enlarging head to sharpen the cutoffs?
This was an early setup and I’ve abandoned it because dichro color mixing did not change results. Other than that, I found that the M605c did not give me even lighting of MF negatives. It was okay for 35mm film though.
Thanks Digitizer. You saved me from buying an enlarging head on Ebay to experiment. I do get beautiful scans from modern films. But if 40+ years old the colors are hard to adjust. Sometimes you get an image that is too green and too magenta!!!.
You also inspired me to post my rig on “Let’s see your DSLR film scanning setup”— My setup
Thanks again!! You saved me a lot of time and some money too.
I found that preprocessing difficult negatives can help. Amongst other things I tried, I let Lightroom auto-adjust the negative before converting with NLP, sometimes, it helps to move the black and white points of the combined RGB tone curve too.
Thanks Digitizer for the preprocessing idea. The auto-white balance in LR does seem to help. But I tried moving the black and white points and even though the negative view and the negative histogram radically changed in Lightroom the positive from NLP did not change at all. (I must assume that Nate is making the same adjustment within NLP).
If you look at the separate R, G and B tone curves, you’ll see one of the devices of how NLP works. There’s more to it than that though. Still, you can try all sorts of more or less crazy things for preprocessing like dents in the RGB tone curve (don’t limit yourself) and see what comes off it.
Even if it might not turn a frog into a princess, it might help to understand your tools…
Funny you mention it… I have been working to convert this Super Chromega D head in order to take SoLux bulbs, which, as mentioned in this post would possibly be the best light source we could imagine as a backlight. I still need help on finding a proper power supply… any clues here folks?
