Quickly improve your colour film scans

[FishyFish]

I watched this video the other day and it gives a great tip for improving your colour scans.

View: https://youtu.be/gLFZh7M4PFY?si=9bfriCtVypx9yYnX


I gave it a quick try this afternoon and have been very impressed with what can be achieved very easily. All my new scans use Negative Lab Pro, so it doesn't really help with those, but older lab scans or stuff scanned using Vuescan / Silverfast / Epson scan etc. all seem to work with the technique. I used Lightroom to make the edits, but the Camera Raw filter in Photoshop should allow it too, as will any other editor that allows adjustments to colour curves (although I haven't tried anything other than Lightroom).

Here's a random colour negative with some tweaks to the colour curves. Before and after:


colour curves tweak #1 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr

I'm especially impressed with how it can improve reversal scans. Here are some old slides scans I have in my collection. Again, before and after for each.


colour curves tweak #2 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr


colour curves tweak #3 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr


colour curves tweak #4 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr


colour curves tweak #5 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr

 

[sirch]

Looks good, thanks for sharing

 

[Kevin Allan]

Thanks for the heads up, I've already improved about 50 scans since watching the video. I now remember that I could do something similar in EpsonScan during scanning, either as a curves adjustment or a levels adjustment for each colour channel. The advantage of doing a levels adjustment rather than a curves adjustment would be that it's less fiddly because you can only drag the point left of right, whereas a curves adjustment allows you to adjust left, right, up, or down, which might result in an unwanted adjustment.

 

[moggi1964]

Thank you. I can use that.

 

[RaglanSurf]

I watched this video the other day and it gives a great tip for improving your colour scans.

View: https://youtu.be/gLFZh7M4PFY?si=9bfriCtVypx9yYnX


I gave it a quick try this afternoon and have been very impressed with what can be achieved very easily. All my new scans use Negative Lab Pro, so it doesn't really help with those, but older lab scans or stuff scanned using Vuescan / Silverfast / Epson scan etc. all seem to work with the technique. I used Lightroom to make the edits, but the Camera Raw filter in Photoshop should allow it too, as will any other editor that allows adjustments to colour curves (although I haven't tried anything other than Lightroom).

Here's a random colour negative with some tweaks to the colour curves. Before and after:


colour curves tweak #1 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr

I'm especially impressed with how it can improve reversal scans. Here are some old slides scans I have in my collection. Again, before and after for each.


colour curves tweak #2 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr


colour curves tweak #3 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr


colour curves tweak #4 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr


colour curves tweak #5 by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr

That's brilliant, thanks for posting. It's particularly useful if you're colour blind

 

[Ian_M]

Very good. His video on the Frontier scanner is also very interesting.