Curves adjustment of the R, G and B channels is perhaps the most common approach, and it can work reasonably well, but the results never seem to be spot-on - and the entire "colour character" of the film can be lost with such adjustments, so even if a nice-looking image is produced, it may not accurately represent the film stock used.įor all the difficulties with manual conversion, I very much like the complete control it provides. Manual conversion in image editors such as GIMP and Photoshop works fine for inversions, but removal of the inevitable colour cast from the film base is always problematic. Of course, you need to own a copy of Lightroom or subscribe to one of Adobe's plans in order to use it, as it's a plug-in - and it's a commercial product, priced at USD $99 (at the time of writing). Complaints aside, NLP is an excellent tool, and it's very quick to use - so for those who want good results fast and with a minimum of effort, I recommend it. My biggest bug-bear with NLP is that some of its inner workings and adjustments are hidden behind poorly-explained presets that don't work consistently for every photo, or even every photo from the same roll - so you may have to go through them one by one to find the best for each individual photo. Skies will sometimes look unnaturally turquoise instead of blue, reds may look over-saturated, and shadows can have an occasional colour cast that needs to be dealt with after conversion. Negative Lab Pro is an excellent tool, and usually results in good-looking colours and tones. Colours will sometimes look OK, other times not, and in many instances you need to find neutral tones within an image to help the tools adjust for white balance and colour accuracy - the problem being, such neutral tones don't occur in every photo. RawTherapee, Darktable and DigiKam's negative tools can work well, but the results are inconsistent and highly dependent on the elements within the captured negative. Finally, I've carried out manual conversions in GIMP. I've also used the commercial Negative Lab Pro plug-in for Lightroom. Of these, I've personally tried RawTherapee's "Film Negative", Darktable's "Negadoctor", and DigiKam's "Color Negative" tools. There are plenty of tutorials on the web for this, employing a variety of different methods. Then, of course, it's possible to manually invert negatives in editors such as Photoshop and GIMP, and fine-tune colours using curves, colour balance and other adjustments. I'm sure there are others I've not listed or discovered yet. There are numerous software methods available to assist with conversion of camera-digitised colour negatives - commercial plug-ins for Lightroom and Photoshop such as Negative Lab Pro, Negmaster and ColorPerfect / ColorNeg, as well as integrated tools in open source raw converters and image editors like Darktable, RawTherapee and DigiKam. so here it is!Ĭolour-Accurate Conversion of Camera-Digitised Film Negatives using GIMP 2.10 and RawTherapee 5.8 I felt a more-thorough and descriptive tutorial was warranted - hosted entirely on PentaxForums, without reliance on external video (especially given my poor video production skills ). I recently posted my personally-developed method for converting camera-digitised colour film negatives to positives using GIMP and RawTherapee, but this was an overview and largely reliant on an off-site YouTube video I created.
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