scanning – Koraks tinkers

All over the place – The problem with color negative film scans

Scanning color negative film is something that often throws people for a loop when it comes to getting “good” colors. I can relate – I still find it a frustrating endeavor sometimes. And it isn’t helped by the algorithms in scanners and scanning software that are intended to make this process easier. The actual result is that these automatic color adjustments make life pretty frustratingly difficult if you’re after consistency! Here’s an illustration (and a solution, but I already discussed that earlier).

Ghosted – When and how to clean an Epson 4990 transparency unit

I’ve had my Epson 4990 since the model was new, so the best part of two decades. It has always served me surprisingly well, although it’s now old enough (by far!) to occasionally require a little TLC. In particular, it can do with a little dusting once in a while.

Flipped – doing color negative inversions manually

One of the frustrating bits of digitizing color negatives is how to get the colors to come out right. At least, that’s how many people feel, and I can relate. There are many ways of doing this, and there’s also software dedicated to this purpose. Since scanning is a bit of sideshow for me, I make do with just the curves tool in GIMP.

Peaks or plateaus – Light sources for DSLR scanning color negatives

Many people like to shoot film, but enjoy their images in the digital domain and the possibilities it warrants for post-processing, printing, etc. This means that the film images need to be scanned, and using a DSLR to do this has become very popular in recent years. But it does bring up some questions – mainly: what’s the best way to do this? And in particular, if you photograph a backlit negative, what kind of backlight would be preferable? I’m going to reflect on this for a bit on a theoretical basis.

Balancing act – A brief look at ECN2 vs. C41 colors

When ‘Cinestill’ film came around, I just had to try it – although I have mostly used the original Kodak Vision3 stock instead of the remjet-less Cinestill variants. Frankly, I didn’t get along with it, and I’ve been quite vocal about it on the forums, too. But a couple of years after my initial bout of experimentation, I felt it was time for a re-assessment. Here’s a brief reflection on color balance of Kodak Vision3 250D film. After all, color balance is perhaps the most pressing matter when it comes to using Vision3 films for still photography.