Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
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Handling Color Negatives:
Scanning color negatives produces many issues and problems. As
mentioned, there is no universally accepted color negative target. A color negative can't be
matched to anything since it's an inverted image with an orange mask. This makes handling
this type of film different than scanning a transparency that we attempt to match as viewed
under a D50 box. Color negatives provide some advantages to the photographer. The exposure
latitude is far more forgiving then transparency film, the negative can actually contain a longer
tonal scale, and under mixed lighting, the color balance is often quite adaptable. Anyone that
has ever printed color negatives in a wet darkroom knows that the correct color is solely at the
discretion of the person making the print. The same is true for scanning a color negative. For
this reason, a calibrated display is absolutely critical. Some packages that drive the scanner and
handle color negatives can invert the image and remove the orange mask. The ability of the
driver to do this well varies from package to package. I've seen the same scanner hardware
driven by two different scanner drivers produce radically different quality from the same neg-
ative. Some scanner drivers, such as Imacon's FlexColor and LaserSoft's SliverFast, do an
admirable job of handling the inversion and orange mask removal and have come up with some
unique proprietary methods of producing a color management savvy solution.
We need to have the previews in the scanning software and the previews in Photoshop
match. One solution for those using a scanner that is either poor at handling color negatives
or isn't ICC aware is to purchase a third-party scanner driver. If that's not possible, you can
attempt to scan the image as a color negative and invert the image and remove the color mask
in Photoshop. Scan the image high-bit with a somewhat flat tonal range. In Photoshop, inverse
the image using
Image-Adjust-Invert
or
Command/Control I
. At this point, you still have a flat
and rather ugly looking image. Use the
Levels
control and attempt to adjust the tonal scale.
Hold down the
Option/Alt
key while dragging on the input sliders to produce a preview that
shows just what pixels that will clip to zero or 255, as seen in Fig. 4-8. Try using Photoshop's
Auto Color
command to remove the cast from the orange mask, which is likely quite cyan.
Auto
Color
can work surprisingly well. Getting an acceptable color appearance after some work with
Photoshop is possible.
Getting Scans from Outside Sources
Occasionally you may need to purchase scans from outside services. Obvi-
ously, you want to get the scan color managed, which means that the
shop producing the scans must have an ICC input profile of their scanner.
Being somewhat of a suspicious fellow, and having experience with labs
and shops that don't fully understand color management, I present the
following suggestions. Tell the shop what size scan you want but make
it absolutely clear you do not want the scan provided in a standard RGB
working space. Rather, you want the scan provided in the scanner's
native color space and tagged with the scanner's input profile. This pro-
vides you with all the data the scanner is capable of producing and even
better, ensures that the lab actually does use color management and ICC
profiles. If you received the scan in Adobe RGB (1998), you don't know
