Processing colour negatives

[Rawcoll]

I have a digitised version (TIFF in Adobe colour space) of an image taken on colour negative film. What is the best way of processing this and dealing with the colour mask please, using PWPro v5? (The negative is too large for my film scanner so I am unable to use the scanner software to convert).

Thanks
Ian

[ksinkel]

The Color/Negative transformation deals with the orange mask. Please look at the PWP manual for the procedure for using th transformaiton. It is described in chapter 6. Using Color Transformations/Negative. You can navigate directly to the topic using the outline navigator in the left panel.

Kiril

[Rawcoll]

Thanks Kiril, I might have known that there was already a feature in PWPro!

However, the result I get is rather speckled (a bit like noise, with a bit of chroma thrown in). Maybe I need to work at it a bit more, though I have to admit that the original is of an ancient sepia toned monochrome print, long past its best. Interestingly, if I use colour-balance to subtract the mask colour and then use the grey-negative transformation I can achieve a smoother, less speckly result. I would have guessed that this is all that the colour-negative transformation is doing, so I'm not really sure why there is the difference. Maybe it is just that the contrast levels are different. As I say, these are just my preliminary findings.

Regards
Ian

[jsachs]

Due to the rather extreme curves that must be applied to convert color negatives to positives, it is usually better use a film scanner and let the scanner do the conversion. If not, it is important to scan 48-bit color ifs possible. Otherwise you are often stuck with a lot of noise.