I scanned 210 6x6 Kodak VPS colour negatives of my wedding using a Hasselblad X5 and FlexColor. Scanned as Nate suggested, 3F RAW, 16-bit, no settings, scanned as “positives”. All is good and negatives look great.
I time with the scanner at a local digital print shop so to save time, I only saved a few of the negatives as TIF files. I made copies and saved just to make sure they would change okay.
So I open FlexColor software on my home computer and I noticed the size of the files converted from fff to tif at the print shop were about 370 MB each at 48-bit but the saved fff to tiff files at home are about 140 MB at 24-bit.
I surmise the size difference has to do with the 48-bit vs. 24-bit. Is there a setting in the FlexColor software I’m using at home that should changed to keep the size at 48-bit or what is your suggestions.
Thank you! Looking forward to finally using NLP to get these negs turned into brilliant large TV slide show!
TIFF can be saved as 16 bit or 8 bit per channel. 8 bit TIFFs can also be compressed.
I suppose that you save as compressed 8 bit TIFF vs. 16 bit TIFF at the shop.
I recommend you verify your software settings and/or consult the Flexcolor manual.
You folks are correct. I already had the FC software, but I wasn’t changing the setting to RBG 16-bit first. Interface so ancient it took me a while to find my way around. I’m buying NLP today and I cannot wait to begin the editing process. Cheers!
It is very powerful software though, and I find it makes very good colour negative conversions as it is I imagine ‘tuned’ to the specific RGB linear sensor of the scanner.
I am completely blown away at this plugin! Truly amazing conversions on a few of my test images. This image went from Hasselblad .fff scan at 3200ppi to .tiff, then to *.jpg cropped. I manually dust-spotted and I only pulled down highlights on dresses (negatives are a bit overexposed). 32 year young 120sq/6x6 Kodak VPS film.
My next steps are to mass convert all 210 negatives to positives. If I understand correctly (and I’ve viewed just about every video tutorial I can find), I prefer to
In Lightroom, manually white-balance one image and make colour, highlights, blacks, etc., adjustments.
Select all negatives and apply the settings to all negatives.
Open NLP
Covert Tab: Type: Negative, Source: TIFF Scan, Color Model: 3-Default, Border can be set to 0% for my cropped scans.
Tick Roll Analysis on.
Click Apply.
Is this the basic settings. This is the same I used on the reference image linked above. I know each image will need some additional adjustments, but I’m in a grey tux which previously (before NLP) had different hues even though whites were white.
Sometimes I previously got a slightly yellow-grey tux, some were grey, and some were greenish-grey. Having a past history in a real darkroom and printing from the late 1970’s to mid 1990’s, I know how some of these colors were influenced.
But I just want to be sure I get a good start on these conversations. Fortunately, nearly all of the exposures and colors are very similar.
What a fun project! VPS can be a notoriously challenging film to print/scan. Professional labs back in the 90s used color analyzers calibrated to their optical printers, and the results were always stunning. VPS does tend to run a little yellow when it’s over exposed. VPS was often overexposed simply because it was too thin in the shadows when shot at box speed 160. I would often shoot it at 80.
Here is technique that I use when running conversions with roll analysis. If you get an image that is off on conversion, switch from the EDIT tab to the ROLL tab while NLP is active. Under Roll Settings/Analysis click the drop-down menu and choose this image only, instead of “auto imported photos” and this will bring up the individual conversion for that frame only instead of applying a multi image “balance”. I would say 95% of the time it will make a huge difference in that one frame. I was thinking about putting in a feature request to see if it’s possible to add a hot key for a one click switch between the roll analysis and individual frame conversion without having to go up to the roll menu and make multiple clicks.
Thanks for the tip Chris and I’ll give it a whirl. I just practiced with 10 negs and NLP works incredibly well. I can see it will be best to group similar shots together like all the alter shots together, all the outside shots, cake shots, etc.
I have a tendency to use my radial gradient tool to darker the brightness on just some areas of an image, but I surmise this will be performed after exporting the images as tiff’s?
Looking at my photo album, the photographers did some good old fashioned burning and dodging on some of the images.
Nice Facebook post with the old Noritsu. I’ll have to dig up some pics of the lab I worked at in the mid to late 1970’s. C22 was just phased out and C41 was in! I remember we had to create a custom set of coloured cells for the printer when Fujifilm came along. Ahh, the good 'ol days!