Yellow/Blue Developed Negatives

[bshams]

Hi everyone,

I purchased Negative Lab Pro a couple weeks ago and so far I’ve processed a few hundred negatives, which were DSLR scanned. I’m going through 4 decades worth of old family photos. Negative Lab Pro has been a godsend and I love how it can individually process hundreds of photos in one go. The adjustment options are very powerful and I’ve learned to use them to perfect so many photos.

I’ve had some great successes with many of my rolls of photos, achieving incredible quality and detail that I never knew was laying latent in the negatives all this time.

HOWEVER.

Many of my rolls of negatives have a terrible problem where they turn out looking like this:

I have literally hundreds of negatives that come out like this.

It’s really heartbreaking because I don’t have any developed photos for so many of these. However, the developed photos that I do have actually look decent (not great, but a million times better than this). Which means these negatives were at some point able to create decent photos.

Old developed photos on left, my negative scans on the right.

On the technical side, these negatives have quite narrow histograms, and their blue channel is barely a sliver:

Here are some raw files of some of these photos.(1) (2) (3)

I would really appreciate any help anyone can extend to me about this.

Thank you.

[Digitizer]

Super difficult image, my usual tricks did not make things much better than your screenshots. When I set pre-saturation to its lowest value and engaged a linear/linear-flat model, the extreme duotone was reduced, opening up the playground a little bit.

I first set the negative image to auto-wb and auto-tonality before converting.
Afterwards, I played around with Lightroom 10’s new toning tools.

In cases like these, I often resort to B/W…

[bshams]

I really appreciate your help! I tried out your tips and I learned that the bulk of my problem was that I was developing with high pre-saturation and no color model. I switched to “very low” pre-saturation and “Basic” color model, and now I’m getting a similar result as you. Thank you.

I would really like to know if anyone understands what the actual issue is with these negatives. I have hundreds of photos from many rolls that are like this. Were they developed in a bad way that damaged them? And if so, how was the photo shop able to develop decent photos out of them at the time?

[Digitizer]

@bshams

I would really like to know if anyone understands what the actual issue is with these negatives. I have hundreds of photos from many rolls that are like this. Were they developed in a bad way that damaged them? And if so, how was the photo shop able to develop decent photos out of them at the time?

I’d send one of the films to a lab for prints, see what those prints look like.

[nate]

Something has definitely gone wrong here.

1. How old are the negatives and how were they stored? It’s possible there has damage to the negatives that wasn’t present at the time they were originally developed into prints.
2. What light-table or light source did you use to capture these? I notice what appears to be strong reflections in some of the images (like the beach example) that do not appear to be present in the original print you shared. Any images of your setup could be helpful to diagnose the issue.
3. High amounts of dust can also throw off the image conversion, because it reads it as a part of the negative data if there is enough of it.

-Nate

[bshams]

Thanks for your reply Nate.

The negatives are all around 20 years old and were just stored in these envelopes that the shops would provide with all the developed photos:

I also noticed that “light reflection” that you mentioned, but it’s really strange because it only shows up in some of these damaged photos, and none of my successfully-developed negatives. My successfully developed negatives are actually fantastic–some of them look like pristine quality, professionally shot photos.

Anyways below are some pictures of my setup, which I designed based on all your instructions and suggestions for best practices.

I have not been able to acquire a film holder–they’re not for sale anywhere except in the US it seems, so I’ve built my own makeshift system using some craft materials. I’m using a small chipboard cutlery box, which I had a carpenter cut a hole into, which provides a couple centimetres of distance from the light table. I made a guide and mask for the film using card paper. This holder sits on a light table, and I’ve blocked all excess light. The sprocket holes are blocked, as you’ve recommended.

I’m shooting on a Canon 6D II with macro lens. But after making this, I was no longer able to position the camera over it with a tripod, because the tripod legs got in the way. So I attached the lens hood and placed it on two small boxes to give it the right distance between the lens and film.

Judging from my setup, I believe I’ve eliminated any light going into the lens, but I could be wrong.

Among these problematic photos, many are heavily damaged and are littered with white spots and scratches:

However, there are also many that are almost spot-free, such as the examples in my first post and here:

I appreciate your help with diagnosing this!

[davidS]

This is a pretty old thread. But @bshams if you never solved the problem I would like to offer to scan some with my Nikon Coolscan LS4000 ED. @Digitizer recommended sending some to a lab for prints. That would tell if there is something very wrong with the negatives. My Nikon scanner has technology in some respects similar to commercial labs and quite different from the camera scan with NLP. And it would give you image files to compare.

[bshams]

Thanks @davidS, I’ll be in touch via private message.

[lrnackman]

I have what seems like the same problem. Mostly seems to show up in highlight areas. Please post the result of your experiment as it might help me too. Thanks.

[bshams]

Do you happen to remember if your negatives were developed somewhere where they might have used shoddy developing methods?

[MikeS]

I apologize for reviving this old thread but I’m wondering if an explanation was found for the yellow/amber glow and if a solution exists? I’m a fairly new NLP user and I’ve scanned a couple dozen rolls with a Plustek 8200 and processed them in NLP with excellent results. Some rolls are 40+ years old. But recently I’ve come across 4 rolls from 28 years ago where each photo has this uneven amber glow. All 4 rolls are Kodak Gold 100 and all were processed at the same time in the same lab. No such glow or damage is apparent when looking at the negatives but when scanned and processed they look like the images posted in this thread. Funny thing is back then I was a poor student so I used to buy cheap generic film rolls and all of them turned out great so far but I splurged for Kodak Gold because I was going on a special trip, and only these 4 rolls have this issue. So I would tend to blame the lab (or Kodak?!?) since all my negatives have been stored together the same way for many decades.

In any case, I have played around with Photoshop and was able to remove the amber glow with the Color Replacement Tool on bland and uniform surfaces like a cloudless sky, but that technique doesn’t work so well when the glow is over people or detailed buildings. I’ve also tried other methods separating channels and/or masking, but with limited success. But then again I’m no PS expert. I’m thinking of taking the negatives to a lab to see if they can do anything about this but first I curious to see if any explanation/suggestion/solution can be found here. Thanks!

[bshams]

Hi @MikeS, thanks for adding to this thread. It’s sad to hear that your Kodak Gold rolls had this issue!

The only conclusion I could make about this issue is that it has something to do with the way these rolls were processed. I believe that all my rolls that had this issue were processed by a very low-end photo studio in a developing country I lived in at the time. All my other photos were developed in Canada and they have produced brilliant digital scans.

Tragically, I don’t believe these photos can be recovered; if you look at the histogram I pictured in my earlier thread, the blue channel is barely a sliver of information. There’s just no color data there. I believe the particular development process we used degraded these negatives over time. It probably has something to do with the type or quality of the chemicals.

[rom9]

Hello @bshams, sorry i’m super late to the party here
I’m not a NLP user, and i know nothing about film development. I just found this post while googling for a similar problem and your sample images made me really curious.
So, i created my account here, just to ask you this question: have you tried looking at the Red, Green and Blue channels separately? I mean, looking at the raw image of the negative, before making any conversion.

I don’t have Lightroom but i’m sure there’s a way to do that. Otherwise, you can easily do that in Gimp, using the “Channels” tab.
You’ll notice that the blue channel is actually a positive image, instead of negative, except in the strong highlights.

Here’s the 3 separate channels from one of your samples, after having stretched the histogram of each individual channel:

Note the stripe in the middle of the road: if the blue channel was a true positive image, it should appear white. Instead, it’s darker than the surrounding road; this seems to suggest that it starts behaving as negative again after a certain threshold. Everywhere else (shadows and midtones) the tones are completely reversed.

The other raw samples you posted exhibit a similar behavior. I have no idea how this is possible.
The only thing i found by googling on the topic is the Sabatier effect or pseudo-solarization, but it seems that you have to be quite deliberate to achieve it, and doesn’t seem to be related at all with film age.

In order to recover these pictures, you could try manually tweaking the RGB curves, inverting the R and G curves, while leaving the B curve as is. But you will inevitably get weird highlights. Other sample images you posted are even more difficult, because of more highlights in the picture.

Unfortunately i don’t have a good solution… just wanted to signal my observation in case it might help in solving the mystery of what happened to those negatives.

[bshams]

Thank you so much @rom9 , this is a really excellent investigation! Your observation that the blue channel is positive seems to be spot on. This never occurred to me but once I looked over the images again it makes a lot of sense. I will try to work on these images again and see what I can get out of them by keeping the blue channel positive. I will update this thread with any interesting results.

Thanks again!

[avideman]

I don’t now how is it possible, but @rom9 is right! I have just tryed it and It looks like the blue channel is partly inverted. Maby It is a degradation of the negative. It is better to hold them in your fringe (no frosting!).

[avideman]

You can use treshold adjustment layer with only blue channel enabled in blending options. It might help to get rid of that blue cast in shadows only.