White Balance on Black Film Mask

Flatbed and Film Scanners
1

Hi folks,

Newbie here and I have a question around white-balancing on the black film mask. I am using Plustek 8100 and Silverfast 8 to scan 35mm Portra 400 as 48 bit HDR negatives. So the film mask comes out as black edges around the negative.

When I import it into LR, it’s hard to white-balance on the black film mask and I noticed that even I am off by a bit (visually no different black mask), I will get drastically different results. I tried auto WB and the results are not ideal (sometimes really weird).

I know this might be a user error on my end, but I am really stuck and hoping someone can help me unblock so I can move on to purchase this awesome program! :smiley:

Thanks for the help!

2

White balance is not reliable when dark areas are picked. Try a bright area instead and see what you get. As far as I remember, some kinds of scans should not be WBed before conversion, but I don’t remember the use case right now.

Check out the guide, which you can access using the link in the black stripe at the upper edge of the page. One chapter says:

The recommended workflow for Silverfast is to scan as 48-bit HDR DNGs. This will enable us to use special, dual-illuminant profiles in Lightroom made just for SilverFast negative conversions, and not have to worry about gamma conversions.

  1. Set SilverFast to scan in “positive” mode (so that it doesn’t invert your negative).
  2. Scan as “48-bit HDR” and save as DNG file (depending on your version, this may be done different ways… at least in SF 8.8, I believe you need to go to preferences and check “HDR raw”).
1 Like