jai
Regular
Keen to know what people think about post processing film scans? Often film scans can look flat, and it can be quite tricky to get them looking great.
I think the most important thing is to get the white point and black point right.
Previously, I would try and do that purely in lightroom, but I think that was wrong. There is a limit to how far lightroom allows you to push up the whites. I seem to be getting better results now by setting the white and black points in the scanning software. Vuescan allows you to do this with the histogram after a preview scan.
After that, I do all my adjustments in lightroom.
I try and get the midtones where I want them with the exposure slider and then compensate for this with the white and black sliders.
Clarity and sharpening sliders will tend to bring out grain, but the grain I get using XTOL tends to be pretty fine so sometimes it looks good to bring it out a little.
Heavy editing in lightroom or photoshop feels a bit like cheating, so I tend to be wary of overdoing it. But maybe that is silly, because after all there were a lot of equivalent tools (burning, dodging, contrast filters) in the darkroom days. What do people think?
I think the most important thing is to get the white point and black point right.
Previously, I would try and do that purely in lightroom, but I think that was wrong. There is a limit to how far lightroom allows you to push up the whites. I seem to be getting better results now by setting the white and black points in the scanning software. Vuescan allows you to do this with the histogram after a preview scan.
After that, I do all my adjustments in lightroom.
I try and get the midtones where I want them with the exposure slider and then compensate for this with the white and black sliders.
Clarity and sharpening sliders will tend to bring out grain, but the grain I get using XTOL tends to be pretty fine so sometimes it looks good to bring it out a little.
Heavy editing in lightroom or photoshop feels a bit like cheating, so I tend to be wary of overdoing it. But maybe that is silly, because after all there were a lot of equivalent tools (burning, dodging, contrast filters) in the darkroom days. What do people think?