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Correcting colours from scanned film

tuga

tuga

Legal Alien
I'm struggling to get good colours from a batch of slide film scans.
Skin tones are particularly off...

I find that adjusting Temperature and Tint is not enough and need to make some HSL adjustments...
Anyone have good tips on how to address this on ACR or Lightroom?
Should I adjust Lighting and Contrast first, then HSL and finally White Balance?

The images were scanned ages ago with a Canon FS4000 scanner using VueScan and saved as DNG.
I had forgotten how much I hated the amount of tweaking required to extract anything decent from my ...
 
I am in the process of digitizing a batch of slides taken in the 90s. The make of the film has a great impact on the correction technique.

So I am interested n any responses.

I asked
"colour correction for digitized colour slides"

On Google and got a lot of information, lots of reading and testing to do
 
Post one uncorrected scan here? That might help.
My workflow is normally to correct exposure faults first, then contrast and brightness, and finally colour saturation and vibrance. If the whole colour set is off then you will need to see if one simple alteration along the spectrum will correct it, otherwise it's a matter of plodding through each colour as you go but that's a real PITA and makes me wonder if so, if the scanner is correctly set up??
 
Rockmeister said:
Post one uncorrected scan here? That might help.
My workflow is normally to correct exposure faults first, then contrast and brightness, and finally colour saturation and vibrance. If the whole colour set is off then you will need to see if one simple alteration along the spectrum will correct it, otherwise it's a matter of plodding through each colour as you go but that's a real PITA and makes me wonder if so, if the scanner is correctly set up??
Click to expand...

Thanks.

In the meantime I've managed to find a standard tonal adjustment and white balance group of settings which makes a good starting point for most slide (I shot Provia, Velvia, E100S and E100VS), but I've not yet tried it with said batch of film.

It was the last trip I shot in film (mid '00s) and the department store I got them from had to get a bag of film from the store..."This is all we have left".

I will try to upload a RAW file tomorrow, of a JPEG if that doesn't work. There's only three or four images worth keeping, the rest are family shots, don't realy care if our skin looks purplish...
 
If you were digitising moving pictures from film I'd tell you to download the free version of DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic design. It's a fully featured editing, compositing and colour-correcting system. Of course, it works on single frames too ;)
 
There are so many variables. I bought (or maybe borrowed as I don't have it now) a calibration slide from Kodak and used that to work out what my scanner was doing, then tried to work out what my slide film was doing by photographing a grey card, scanning that slide and then adjusting RGB to 128,128,128. That worked pretty well, but film isn't linear, so different exposures changed the colour balance and film ages, both before and after shooting.

I have several hundred slides that maybe I should scan, but I'm not sure I can face it. I now use a camera, light box, and close up kit to 'scan' and avoid colour issues by only scanning my B&W negs!
 
JemHayward said:
There are so many variables. I bought (or maybe borrowed as I don't have it now) a calibration slide from Kodak and used that to work out what my scanner was doing, then tried to work out what my slide film was doing by photographing a grey card, scanning that slide and then adjusting RGB to 128,128,128. That worked pretty well, but film isn't linear, so different exposures changed the colour balance and film ages, both before and after shooting.

I have several hundred slides that maybe I should scan, but I'm not sure I can face it. I now use a camera, light box, and close up kit to 'scan' and avoid colour issues by only scanning my B&W negs!
Click to expand...

I also bought calibration slides and calibrated VueScan before scanning all my photos.

In this case I feel that the problem is "out of spec" film and will require HSL adjustments, probaly on a case by case basis.
 
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I think I've nailed it. Used a tone curve to tame the wild contrast and then dialed down the saturation of red, orange, aqua and blue.

VumzzTA.jpg
 
Imaging Resource used to have some really good articles about correcting old slides. The white dropper in Photoshop or Lightroom is a good way to make an instant there-or-thereabouts colour temperature correction if you have anything in the frame that is white or neutral grey.
 
Interesting thread. I have a collage of photos in a big frame in the bathroom, where the photos overlap each other. Obviously, they have faded, so I was thinking of scanning and correcting them. Parts of the photos are not faded where they've been overlapped, so I was wondering if I could use the colour profile of the unfaded parts to correct the colour of the rest back to the original? Is there any simple software to do that?
 
Nero said:
Interesting thread. I have a collage of photos in a big frame in the bathroom, where the photos overlap each other. Obviously, they have faded, so I was thinking of scanning and correcting them. Parts of the photos are not faded where they've been overlapped, so I was wondering if I could use the colour profile of the unfaded parts to correct the colour of the rest back to the original? Is there any simple software to do that?
Click to expand...

VueScan used to get good automatic fading correction.
You could try that.
 
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