The colors I am getting out my scans are awful. Shadows on skin often end up red, and landscape pictures just have an insane amount of saturation, contrast, and wrong colors.
I have had one roll recently that actually turned out perfect off the bat, but only one out of maybe 12)
I use a Nikon Z5 with a 90s Micro 105. And I use the Skier Sunray Lightbox (not super happy with this setup but man some of the other products are expensive).
I crop negatives before conversion and I also do the white balance on border thing. Recently I started using the Camera matching neutral color profile as well before conversion, I believe it slightly helped but I am not entirely sure.
What could I be doing wrong? I do not know what exposure I should be using, so I just set a manual exposure that seems to get enough info from the negative and use that across the whole roll. I do this at night with no other lights in the room. I am also not sure what white balance to use in camera when shooting, I leave it at daylight auto.
I tried frontier, basic, and none, all look bad in different ways. I also tried adding a 15% buffer and no buffer but this yields very similar results. I always check roll analysis.
Any other Nikon users out here who could help out with the settings? Or anyone that sees something wrong with my procedure? Any help will be greatly appreciated, I am on the verge of quitting film photography and going back to full digital.
(and side note, if anyone has a budget friendly way to make a decent film scanning setup that helps eliminate dust and does not scratch the film, I am all ears)
You should definitely be able to get some good scans out of this setup.
Feel free to share some RAWs with me (either here on the forum, or you can email me at nate@natephotographic.com) and I will take a look.
Even if the initial conversion does not look great, it can usually be fixed pretty quickly.
If the images have insane amounts of contrast and saturation, this usually means you need to adjust the BlackClip and/or WhiteClip points to better match the natural dynamic range of the scene. For instance, if you are shooting a beach scene without anything dark in the scene itself, you may need to set the BlackClip to a negative number to account for this (there are other ways to do this, but this is the simplest).
In terms of color balance, usually one of the autocolor options will provide a good balance, but it isn’t always perfect, so learning how to adjust the temp and tint is key (don’t be afraid to make big changes to the numbers, just trust your eyes!).
It’s possible that these are just tricky scenes, but it is also possible that the original negatives weren’t exposure properly, or the film was expired, or the film was not developed properly or with old chemicals. There are a lot of variables in film, but once you are able to get the workflow tuned in, the results can be incredibly rewarding.
You should look into wet mounting your camera scans! No dust or scratches. Takes a bit longer to setup, but the results are unbeatable.
Hey Nate, thank you very kindly for taking the time to write this detailed answer with plenty of tips.
I will look into wet mounting, sounds pretty interesting!
I wonder if I just do not understand the cameras metering, my worst converted negatives are from a Pentax 645, shot in a desert-ish setting, lots of light relfecting from the sand, maybe this caused some issues. But I am also getting these problems from my Nikon F4 shots as well, just not as exaggerated. The film used in the Pentax 645 shots was expired a few years ago, but kept in a freezer through its entire life. The film was developed by a lab in Winnipeg, Canada, and shipped to me, when they scan the negatives, they have always come back to me perfect, much nicer than what I am generally able to produce in NLP.
Btw, I spend a long time in NLP playing with all the color balance and temp/tint sliders to get the photos to look natural again.
I am sending you some negatives and xmp files via email and some Jpegs as I can only attach one file here at a time due to being a new user.
Thank you once again for all your help, I am sending all the negatives to you by email right away, expect an email from fruit.rollup999@gmail.com