I am scanning my film with my digital canon 6D ii. I am keeping the white balance at 3500K. But I am getting very inconsistent colors on my scans from the same shoot and same lighting conditions. All of the images here are shot on portra 400. I have edited some to try and get them more consistent. I scanned 10 rolls of film and this happens on all of my shoots. what can i do to make them more consistent?! am I doing something wrong?
Im noticing it is mainly an issue with my white balance and tint being off. any ideas of how I can fix this please?
I think what you’re seeing on those particular shots is a color shift from underexposure…
If you notice the direction of lighting in them, they’re all shot against the sun which can cause underexposure if you don’t compensate for it in camera
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that makes a lot of sense, I am newly learning about exposing for the shadows on my film.
Hi!
Very cool shoot!
It helps to understand a couple of things:
FIRST, By default, Negative Lab Pro will make the brightest thing in the cropped image appear white. This usually works out great, except in scenarios like this with strong, warm backlighting.**
So here, it’s making the warm backlighting appear white (when it should be yellow), and thus the rest of the scene appears blue.
There are two ways you could correct this at the moment:
- Re-convert the image while it is cropped to not include the backlighting. This will keep that backlight from effecting the color balance. You can then crop after conversion however you’d like. In your case, doing this will also blow out the highlights in the background, which you can recover if you’d like using the white clip point control.
- Use the color sliders set to “highs” and add yellow and red to taste. Because the color imbalance is happening because the brightest thing in the image should be orange/yellow, you can just manually correct this using the color slider set to “high.” Doing this, you’re basically saying "I want the brightest thing here to be yellow, not white.
SECOND, By default, Negative Lab Pro is evaluating each negative independently - but you can force it to use the same evaluation
Every image you convert in Negative Lab Pro is receiving its own analysis. So for instance, if you have one shot that contains a strong backlight source, and another that does not, it will read these very differently.
But sometimes this is not what you want it to do. If you have a shot that you feel has converted well (or you have edited to your liking a certain way), you can use the "sync scene" feature to bring those exact same settings and internal evaluation to the other photos.
So you can use Sync Scene to force the same evaluation and settings from one conversion onto the other conversions. Let say you really liked the way you top right image converted, and you wanted to force the same conversion onto the others. Select that top right one first, and then add the other images to your selection… open Negative Lab Pro and hit “Sync Scene” and it will then use the same internal settings across all of them.
I actually use this quite a bit, even across scenes and lighting types. If I have an image where I really like the settings, I’ll try “sync scene” from that image to the rest of the roll.
Does all that make sense? Happy to show examples using these particular images if you’d be up for sharing them.
-Nate
Creator of Negative Lab Pro
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Hi Nate, apologies in advance for resurrecting a 5 year old thread, but I’m experiencing the same issues with NLP 3.0.2, whether I use Roll Analysis or not. I’m still getting inconsistent results across frames, and this is while settings are synced across photos, too.
Also, regarding the Sync feature, I’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to work like it used to in NLP 2.x, where I could convert just one photo, and sync the conversion and settings to the other photos. With NLP 3.x I need to convert all photos first, and THEN, I can sync the settings – is this the expected behavior?
You can see the color shifts between the top and bottom photos in each pair:
First, make sure that are cropping out those film border (either in Lightroom itself, or using the “border buffer” option).
I notice in these frames there is some difference between the amount of film border visible, so this could be part of the problem you are having.
Yes, that is the expected behavior of v3.0… I’m bringing back the simpler sync option in v3.1…
Hey Nate, thanks for the reply.
I have re-converted, this time doing a manual crop to remove any of the film border, but I’m still seeing inconsistencies across photos with very similar subject matter from the same roll.
Just want to note that I was already using the border buffer option as well.
Also, as an added piece of info: when scanning (using VueScan) I always make sure to enable “Lock Exposure.”
I’d be happy to share the original RAW DNG’s if you’d like to look into it.
Thanks again!
Yep, just make sure you do that at the start of the session and keep the values the exact same throughout the whole session. You can also write down the gain numbers and use those in the future if you have to split between multiple sessions.
That’d be great! You can email the raws to me at nate@natephotographic.com, or you post a link to them here in the forum.
-Nate