Possible solution to weird color issue with Kodak Portra 400

Digital Camera Scanning
1

If you’re like me and you’ve been having trouble getting neutral colors from your Portra 400 scans try these steps right after you convert your image to a positive.

  1. Go to profile browser (it’s above the color temp sliders, the 4 squares icon) and look for the Negative Lab Pro drop down menu and select Negative Lab - Natural. Then exit from there.

  2. Right click on the develop panel, next to BASIC for example. Click on Customize Develop Panel. Select Calibration. Click save.

  3. Go To Calibration in the develop panel. Next to Process, select Version 1. You should see a change in your image.

  4. Now click where it says Version 1 and select Version 6 or whatever the current version is.

  5. Start adjusting photo like your normally would and you should nothing things look a lot better than they did before.

I’m not sure exactly what’s going on but it has seemed to fix my problem with getting weird over saturated colors, esp in the sky.

I tried looking everywhere and I haven’t seen any information about Calibration or the different versions and what they do exactly but I think this might be the solution to the problem!

Hope this helps.

-Will

2

Basically you recommend to import images in Version 1 which In LR means import file with gamma =1. That actually helps for some images not properly exposed during the digitizing. I recommend white balancing in that state and then exporting 16 bit tiff. That exported tiff should be brought back in LR and corrected as usual. The export to tiff needed because after WB you may not have have enough space on your sliders to continue grading. Export -import bring sliders into neutral and allows for required tweaks. HTH

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