Subject says it all. My negs are under exposed and very dark. Can any alteration to the scanning process help this? Fixing in Lightroom is not possible with film as we all know.
Thanks
Surely very dark negatives mean that they were originally over exposed in the camera?
If that’s the case then when scanning you’ll need to use a much longer exposure time and the quality will be affected, the tones will likely be compressed and there will be a lack of definition but it will depend upon how over exposed they are.
Hi again haha
I’m not sure if they were over or underexposed tbh, when I convert the negs to positives, they are underexposed.
@Cacti , if the negative is very dark, it means that it was overexposed. You should also see a clear difference between the negative and the film base, which is usually not exposed and looks orange.
If you camera scan these negatives, you can expose in a way to make the histogram move away from the left edge. Don’t overdo it though. The histogram might remain fairly narrow too, depending on how far the capture was from correct exposure.
So would the best thing to do be underexposing on scan?
Never-mind, just expose to bring the histogram away from the left (or right) edge. There should be no spike at the edges of the histogram area.
If the histogram huddles at the left edge, increase exposure, if it sticks to the right, reduce exposure. It’s easy if your camera supports live histograms, preferably a RGB histogram. Search your camera menus or manual for histogram display.
So should I aim to have the histogram right smack in the middle or do I need to compensate for it being overexposed?
the histogram shows what you’ll get, no matter whether the source (negative) was over- or underexposed. You can probably increase exposure by one stop…and stop asking and start trying. Nothing beats your own experience 
One good practice to start with is to take a series of scans with increasing exposure. Some of that stuff is in the user guide. Have you checked out the user guide?
Just to avoid confusion from my interpretation that the negative might be over-exposed on the film. The negative you show here, the line of trees (if that’s what it is), seems to have more or less the same density as the film base, so not much shadow detail there in the original negative. In addition neither the sky or the foreground are as dense as they could be. Not meant as a criticism, just to qualify what I was thinking in my earlier post.
Yeah, I lot of my shots are like this. I think you’re right about it being overexposed. I never realized that correlates to an underexposed positive with film.
Oops, I wasn’t clear and that was the only reason I was mentioning it, sorry! In my opinion the actual negative (not the digital scan) was under exposed. A bit more exposure, a slower shutter speed perhaps, would have given more density on the negative in all areas but particularly on those trees. The very definition of being wise after the event though, and you will get a result. Actually camera scanning has ‘rescued’ some of my past under exposed negatives, particularly with B&W.
I was confused haha. Yes, I think the original negs are way under-exposed.
Weird, I used an iPhone light meter, but I guess it’s not very accurate.
Those iphone light meters actually are pretty accurate.
Did you run NLP on these scans? My experience is that NLP will add a lot of brightness or exposure to compensate for something that shouldn’t be compensated for. I really need a way to to control that and let the pictures still be underexposed.
As of now, the one way to control exposure with NLP is to use the sliders on the second tab.
Alternatively, Lightroom’s tools can be used. This takes some getting used to because they work in reverse, unless one works on positive copies.
We could now think that NLP could be set to NOT stretch the histogram, but how would it know whether that is what we want or not? We’d have to check/select/set something. Downside: Not stretching the histogram (aka auto-exposure) could limit the range of usable values and increase the risk of posterization.
Yep, all scanned with NLP.
Let’s break this down to two stages: capture stage and digitization stage. At the capture stage, light meters, if you just point them generally at a scene, will average the light and produce an average exposure recommendation. In a scene with extremes of lighting, this runs the risk of over-exposing some areas and under-exposing others. Because most of us would have made these exposures some time ago, by now all those errors are baked-in and all we can do is cope with them. As others have mentioned, but for clarity to underline: in the negative, under-exposed portions will look very weak/bright/thin (little visible image content) on the negative, over-exposed portions will look very dense/dark/thick (little visible image content) on the negative.
So now we move on to the now relevant stage of digitization: how do we render this negative? Exposure is everything. If I were dealing with photos looking like those displayed here, (and indeed I have done so successfully over time) I would make several exposures, relying on both your eyes and the histogram to ensure that each one of those exposures produces readable, useful information in the extreme highlights (dark portions of the negative) for one frame and extreme shadows (bright portions of the negative) for another frame. then before doing anything in NLP I would merge them in Lightroom using Photo Merge>HDR. This produces a DNG file that will be much more amenable to successful editing in NLP and Lr. Proceed to convert that version in NLP and make any further adjustments you need from that point onward.
If you find the Merge to HDR does not produce a good enough exposure range (unusual), the alternative approach will be to open these exposures from Lr to Ps (“Edit in”), layer them, and blend them manually using opacity controls and/or gradients on layer masks, then Save to Lr and use NLP to convert.