Photographers! Need help creating digital proof sheets: bad color balance

I’ve decided to start the gargantuan process of digitizing my still film negatives and slides. For much of my adult life I have been a semi-professional photographer and journalist. I started taking pictures in high school, about 50 years ago, and got my first digital camera about 12 years ago. So I have 38 years worth of b&w and color negatives and slides, in 35mm and 120 (6x6 cm) formats. I haven’t even begun a real inventory, but I estimate I have several tens of thousands of images.

Obviously, scanning every one of those negatives, even at the fastest, low-quality resolution, would take hundreds of hours. And, of course, I don’t really need to have a good scan of every image. I just need to know what I have so I can make scans of the small fraction of them that I really care about.

I hit on the idea of creating digital proof sheets. Most of the negs are stored in transparent sleeves that hold a full roll on a page. My scanner (Canoscan 9000F) cannot scan a full page, and even those that can would take a very long time to scan that large an image.

So I bought an LED light panel, set my DSLR (Canon 80D, 75-300 zoom, set to F8) above it and have been putting the sheets on the panel and snapping away. I was able to shoot more than 200 rolls in a couple of hours. I set up some macros in Photoshop Elements to automatically invert and sharpen them. (The processing and naming of the files took longer than shooting them.)

The b&w negs turned out fine, but the proofs of the color negs looked terrible: a deep blue cast that I couldn’t get close to fixing by using the normal color adjustments in PSE. At first I thought that negs had just faded badly and that there was nothing I could do about it.

But after a while it dawned on me that my camera was set to Auto White Balance. It was looking at those orange negs, assuming that that was the normal color of the scene, and making rather extreme adjustments. So I tried setting WB manually to the camera’s lowest setting, 2500K. This yielded much better results. I still have to do a little processing in PSE to boost the contrast and sharpness, but this seems to be a workable solution. (Now I’ll have to go back and redo a couple dozen sheets.)

But I’m not sure this is the *best *solution. Is there a better, or more precise, way of doing this? I got to setting AWB at 2500K by trial and error. But I have a feeling that there must be a filter or setting that would be the *proper *way to solve this problem. Is there?

Have you ever done anything like this, and do you have any other suggestions for improving my workflow or results?

Hopefully someone who has done exactly what you are doing will come along.

Locking in the white balance on the camera is definitely the starting point, as is ensuring stable light (your light panel).

You may need to color balance your monitor in order to get rid of any cast there. There are expensive gadgets to do that, and they are a necessity for serious photography, but you should be able to get away with one of the free color balancing software tools available.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the colors are off because of fading. For example, if a negative yellows, that would add the opposite of yellow to a positive, creating a blue cast.
This definitely won’t be uniform from one batch to the next.

Do you have Lightroom or similar? Are you shooting RAW? You can find a pretty close color balance by putting a white sheet of paper over your light panel. Frame it fully in your camera or use center-weighted metering. Use what it shows as the “correct” exposure: it should actually expose your paper to a shade of gray (18%, usually). Open the CR2 file in Lightroom (or Photoshop works, as it’ll open in Adobe Camera raw.) Use the white balance eyedropper to click in the middle of the frame; see what Kelvin and tint adjustment it gives you. Click around and sample a few points and that should get you in the right ballpark. Remember, it’s not just color temperature, it’s also tint.

With that, you will get the correct white balance, but that means your negs will turn out orange. You have to fix that in post. There are a number of ways to do that which you can look up online. The easiest is using software like Negative Lab Pro which has various film stocks and camera combinations built-in and is available as a Lightroom plug-in. The minus is that it costs $99 (but the download is free). Or Google for other programs that are similar.

You can also try creating your own custom negative curve or profile in Lightroom. (I have one I custom made for my camera that you can try and see if it gets you in the ballpark.) There is also a technique in Photoshop that has you sampling the film stock and then using it as a subtractive layer to remove the orange mask.

There’s many different techniques for it. Look around and see what you can find. I haven’t done color negs in a long time, just chromes/positives/slides and bw negs, but I use a similar technique (except I use a slide/neg copying adapter (like this one) and a macro lens to photograph my film.

Thanks for your reply, pulykamell. I was hoping you’d show up. I don’t have time right now for a longer post, but I have a quick question. (I’m sure I’ll have more after I’ve tried some of your suggestions.)

Why put a piece of paper over the panel rather than shooting it directly?

Actually, you can do it that way, too. I was just using it to diffuse the light even more, but not necessary. I’m looking at my negative profile, and I just realized it’s not for color film–it’s just an inversion curve for Lightroom, as Lightroom doesn’t have an “invert” command on it like Photoshop does. After that, I sample the negative base with the white balance tool, and I get the colors fairly close, but it still can use some fine tuning. Let me see how one of these commercial programs do with the color negs I found in my archives (last color negs I “scanned” by photographing are from 2015, it seems.)

You shouldn’t have to use paper.

A light panel (while lit, of course) will be the correct kind of source for a custom white balance calibration capture.

Put the WB square in your viewfinder right in the middle of the panel and take your calibration shot.

It occurs to me that the light panel you linked to doesn’t say anything about photography on it. Do you know if the light is full spectrum? If it’s an approximation of white light that has big gaps in the spectrum there could be trouble.

Petapixel here has an step-by-step%2C%20for%20colour%20negative%20film.) explanation of how to do it. They recommend actually setting the color temp to the lowest possible temperature when taking the photo, but, if you’re shooting raw, this doesn’t matter. This does seem to be correct advice, though, as when I color correct in Lightroom, I end up dialling down the white balance to 2000K and my tint is somewhere around -50 before I invert it. So, if you’re shooting raw, don’t worry about the white balance too much, as you’ll correct that in Lightroom/Photoshop, anyway and you can just cut & paste those numbers onto all the film photos that use the same stock.

OK, I just tried Negative Lab Pro, and it does work well. I’m going to see if I can replicate its results with a custom profile and curve setting.

After seeing how bad my first proofs looked, and assuming the problem was faded emulsions, I was bothered because I couldn’t believe they could all have faded that badly. So I decided to test the theory by doing a real scan on my scanner. Sure enough, the scan yielded a perfectly fine image. So the problem had to be elsewhere. Before I realized that AWB was part of the problem, the possibility of the panel having an uneven spectrum was my next guess. I began thinking of possible solutions to that question when I realized the AWB issue. The panel may have a spotty spectrum, and I may be able to see it when I check the AWB test frames, but I think the AWB problem swamps the panel’s issues.

Thanks very much for that article! It certainly gives me a lot of good info for what I’m doing with the proofs, as well as some ideas for shooting instead of scanning my negs and slides at a later date. Once I have the tools set up, it would certainly be faster than scanning.

I’ll admit I’m far from a master when it comes to shooting and post processing. Most of my work shooting for the last few decades has been for my own print newsletter, which is only b&w. So I haven’t done much with color post work, and have a bit of a learning curve ahead of me to get comfortable with all this new tech and processing. But it should be interesting!

The good news is that my for my immediate needs, there’s no need for any great level of precision. These proofs are primarily for reference, just so I can tell which roll is Grandma’s wedding and which one is that job in Boston, and so on. The color on the first batch was so far off, I could hardly bear to look at them. Now, I *could *have just done them in b&w, but it will be nicer to have reasonably accurate color. And a little time spent now in getting the process set up properly will pay off with lots of good-looking proofs that I can shoot easily and quickly.

Thanks again to both of you.

Not sure from the post. But are you shooting the sheets with the negs in the sleeves?
Maybe the sleeves have UV filtering qualities? To help preserve the negs. If so, maybe it is a problem with the blue end of the color spectrum, not the actual white balance.
Just a wild guess. I have a bit of photography experience. Color balance can be a hard thing to track down.

Some good advice so far because there’s many factors at play here. I was suspicious of the light panel too, because I don’t see anything about its color temperature or color rendering index (CRI). CRI is mostly used for light bulbs to indicate how good they are at representing colors. 100 is the best, and is equivalent to the sun or a standard incandescent or halogen light. Good LED lights are getting to around the 95 range. There’s bad fluorescent lights out there with CRI’s in the 70s or 80s, making some colors look very muddy and undifferentiated. Even high CRI bulbs can still be flawed because the score is measured off of a limited set of reference colors. So some manufacturers tweak their phosphors to properly render the colors in the test, leaving the rest to chance. There could be some of this going on in your light panel, but without any information on it we can’t know.

The other thing is that we have not only the color temperature of the light panel, there’s also the color cast of the slides, as well as the white balance of the scene in each shot. Those are a lot of moving parts. Nevertheless, a good curve adjustment can fix most of that, even though it’s a lot of “stuff” layered on top of each other. At a minimum the shadows, midtones, and highlights need to be sampled to establish a rough curve, not just a single color temperature adjustment applied across the whole image. The curve will still change depending on the white balance of the scene itself, but as long as you have some nearly black, medium gray, and nearly white objects in the scene (not always as easy as it sounds, I know) then adjusting the curves is as simple as clicking an eyedropper tool a couple of times.

commasense, I tried to read through the thread but it wasn’t clear to me whether this was fully fixed. Did you make it work yet?

Just want to be clear about something… as long as you have a full-spectrumish bulb (something with good CRI) and shoot RAW in manual (turn off AWB), under consistent lighting conditions, you should be able to manually tweak the color in Lightroom (or similar) NOT just in Kelvin (2700k, etc.) but with the advanced controls like the neutral gray picker or adjusting saturation sliders.

So shoot all the negatives fully manual, don’t let the camera guess anything, turning off AWB and also auto ISO etc. You’re shooting under controlled conditions, so if the camera’s guessing you’ve changed something, it’s wrong.

Then spend a few minutes editing one sheet in Lightroom, tweaking it very precisely, and then can copy and paste those adjustments across all your photos to apply the same corrections to all of them at once.

(Sorry if this was already what you were doing… I couldn’t tell if you were trying to manually go in there and un-fuck-up the AWB one sheet at a time, which would take forever.)