Is there no definitive way a photo is supposed to look after inverting a negative? For example, when converting Kodak Gold 200, is there any method to know how the colors are meant to look—like a reference point from how it would appear in a traditional darkroom print or lab scan?
I’ve noticed people tweaking colors, tones, and white balance sliders quite heavily, and while the results can look great, it sometimes feels more like creative grading than faithful reproduction. I’m not against interpretation, but I’m curious:
Is there a way to determine a “neutral” or “true-to-film” look?
How do you know where to set the white balance so it’s not just personal taste?
Are there any tools or color references to help get closer to how a lab print would look?
Would really appreciate your thoughts on this—especially from those with experience in both digital and analog workflows. Thanks!
I’m not sure that you could even assume that you would get the same result from sending your colour negative off to get either a traditional darkroom print or indeed a processed lab scan. With colour negative it has to be a subjective interpretation made by the technician though a good lab will have tested all the films they were likely to encounter. Traditional colour printing in the darkroom does have far fewer options than modern software though, just colour filtration, exposure and perhaps choice of paper so you can’t change the relative balance between the colours as you can now with software. Personally in the darkroom I would ‘adjust’ the white balance to suit how I wanted the scene to look.
I’d say that from the manufacturers’ point of view the character of a particular colour negative film is down to the both the inherent contrast and to how it portrays the colours within the scene. Films designed for weddings and portraits had lower contrast and a more muted palette, films for commercial photography, products and architecture perhaps, had more contrast and bolder colours. Other films, like Kodak Ektar (famed for its vivid colours) might have more significant colour traits that the advertising played on and I’m sure that Fuji also try to work their colour science into their colour negative films just as they have done so successfully with colour transparency.
Once you scan with either a camera or a dedicated film scanner then the result depends much more on the software that is used to process the result, so now we have the Frontier or Noritsu ‘look’ for example, even within NLP, named after the actual scanners.
Simple: There is a definitive way…and it entirely depends on what you want/like/need.
Not so simple: If you work for someone else, you’ll have to adopt their measure.
Think of NLP-output as a step-stone for anything that you want to do in order to make the image look according to your current mood/taste/feeling. If you consider making an image an art, the points are to e.g. to know what kind of feeling you want to provoke and, more importantly, when to stop. With digital, many things can be undone though, but it doesn’t necessarily help you vision.
I think the best thing to do is to change your mindset and forget about film looks and lab print looks. Instead, focus on the photograph you are making and what interpretation of colours you think best conveys what tone and colour you wanted to convey when you made the photograph, if you can remember. Then adjust the image accordingly. With today’s digital technologies you can achieve tonal and colour results from those negatives that older analog processes were incapable of, especially with masking and local editing.
If you don’t trust what your mind’s eyes are telling you about “neutrality” (which is not a holy grail by the way) and you were not using a gray card when you made the photos (e.g. I was making photos years before I ever saw a gray card - my bad), if you want some kind of possibly objective handle on image colour, you would need to find what you think is a truly gray spot in the converted image, then freeze the cursor of (a handy Apple application) over that spot and adjust the colour balance in NLP till it shows Lab a* and b* channels as close to 0. Then inspect the rest of the photo to see whether the colours are credible. If they aren’t, you know your supposed gray spot wasn’t gray and you are back to pure judgment - often the best way.
The first thing you can do is to be sure your computer display(s) are calibrated with a hardware and software solution from Calibrite or Datacolor. In the digital world, there ARE reference standards that result in calibration and the creation of ICC profiles for all your devices. But that is topic for other discussion.
Once you can rely on your calibrated and profiled monitor, you can try other things. Photographing a ColorChecker Chart is a good reference. If you have that as a reference, and view it under 5000K illumination of the same intensity as your monitor, it will enable you to dial in a correction that looks more like reality. However, the last tweaks are always up to you.
If you’re working from old color negatives, you have to use your experience and knowledge of the color wheel to dial in something that looks right. I never found film to be an exacting medium, because there are so many variables:
Processing chemistry condition (fresh vs stale, replenishment rate, pH, etc.), plus temperature, time, agitation, and contamination variations
Film emulsion batch (every batch of Kodak color film has a slightly different color balance)
Film “generation” (How many times did the manufacturer tweak the film “formula” without changing the name of it?)
Exposure (The slope of the RGB response curves varies with exposure! You need a different balance at one stop over compared with one stop under, in addition to contrast adjustments.)
Light Source (This always affects white balance of the original scene AND the capture of the negative during camera scanning or other scanning method)
Storage conditions for unexposed and exposed, unprocessed film (heat and higher frequency radiation can fog film)
Storage conditions for processed negatives (dyes fade with exposure to heat and higher frequency radiation)
Perhaps the best tools are experience and persistence…
While I completely agree with folks who already responded, I can suggest simple while a bit expensive way to free yourself from this nagging question. You need a reference scene which includes wide variety of colors , including skin tone and intense colors and colors guaranteed to be out of gamut like blue or violet orchids and deeply red roses.
Have this scheme arranged at midday illuminated by sun . Use white styrofoam sheets to diffuse light.
Make number of shots with wide bracketing on your favourite film stocks . Process film in known decent lab. Have them scan your film. Find darkroom where they can make classic color prints without any digital involved.
Finally start scanning film yourself - use all shots in brackets as you don’t know before hand which negative will be best for scanning. In the end you will have the answer to your question and some. Of course assembling and lighting original shot will be the hardest part as you should not use any artificial light (use electronic strobes if you must ) . Also all the grey scales and other color targets need to be illuminated properly without any hot spots ( sun rays hitting them at 45 degrees angle re lens axis). Once you announce that you are going to do this, I believe you will get strong support from this community. Good luck! I know @Richard1Karash created his famous scene and distributed his negatives around community, I created my targets going through number of generations and using lot of input from community members. So this is fun project to do, it’s much more informative than any answers on the forum.