just recently took up digital camera scanning, have tons of 35mm color negatives to scan, Fuji and Kodak.
Before getting to my questions, here’s my equipment:
Sony A6400 + Rodenstock Rodagon 50mm f2.8 mounted in reverse with tubes extension (this allows me to scan without cropping)
Skier Sunray II using 35mm slot (it looks like there’s a version 3 with 3 power levels)
I’m trying out Negative Lab Pro to see if there’s a way I can consistently apply and get good color results from 35mm neg scans. I’m not looking for the best, I just want good or very good apply and forget settings that I don’t need to keep adjusting for 90-95% of the time.
With that said, can someone tell me what is wrong with the settings below? I use pretty much straight out of the box, I use Negative Lab Pro 2.2 trial with Adobe Lightroom Classic 6. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I apply Auto White Balance and pick a sample of the corner or not. Then I apply NLP using default setting Frontier or Noritsu Pre-saturation 3 or 4 and convert.
If you ask me, the issues are: skies are not supposed to be grey, there’s a lot of purplish and what should be sharp blue looks like light green. The worse looking pictures are digicam scan using the process that I described above, the other is a scan using an all-in-one from original photo printed many years ago from those same negatives.
Can you post a link to where we download your raw files in order to check? Negatives can deteriorate over time and letting us check a shot or two can maybe help to point you in the right direction.
Have you tried the “Basic” setting and a pre-saturation value of less than 3? If there were a magic setting, we’d need no options
My best guess is that the negatives themselves are damaged in some way. Film negatives can deteriorate or get damaged over time, depending on how they are stored.
Yes, it looks like a similar problem as I have with 70% of my negatives. I’ve scanned hundreds of negatives with varying degrees of this problem.
I’m not sure it’s a result of storage, because I have several rolls of negatives that produced pristine/perfect quality scans, and they were all stored in the same bags in the same way as the bad ones.
I believe the problem has something to do with either the quality of the negative film, or the process/chemicals used to develop them. I don’t know anything about negative development but I’m almost certain, based on this problem, that there are good and bad ways of developing them. Most of my “bad” film was developed in a Chinese-owned shop in our small african country, where there are no standards or quality options. Most of my good negatives were developed in north america.
I believe their negative development process or chemicals were just low quality, and so the negatives degraded over time. That’s why they produced decent quality photos at the time but now they don’t.
