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This is very much via Doug Plummer. Until his post (as linked), I hadn’t heard of ColorNeg, but serendipitous coincidence that it was, I was just considering running some scans as raw scans (i.e. you save a tiff file of the pure scan data without any curves or adjustments, and it looks much like an unadjusted raw file – all dark and bunched to the left of the histogram), as the next step in my understanding of what a scanner does, when Doug made his post about a Photoshop plugin that is specifically designed to deal with raw scans and invert and convert them for onward processing.

As you might guess from its name, it is primarly designed for colour negatives, but I can report that it works fine for mono negs as well. In fact, I can report that it works fine, full stop. Oh, except that the documentation is a bit dense.

But why would you want to do this? Firstly there is the thought that scanners are designed for positive materials and the implementation of negative scanning was always a bit of an afterthought (and with this methodology you are treating the negative as a positive during the scan). This may or may not be true. Secondly there is the observation that scanners do very little that can be varied and that scanner software is simply doing a series of curves and adjustments on top of the raw scan before export. Scanner software is, on the whole, less well written than Photoshop. Thirdly there is the practical issue that if you save a raw scan then the negative doesn’t need to ever be rescanned short of a breakthrough in scanner hardware. Changing your mind about what the picture should look like simply means reopening the raw scan file. And finally, my practical experience of looking at lots of 35mm mono negative scans and being less and less happy with the tonal performance of my scanner and wondering whether it was truly the scanner or not.

I’ve spent several hours this evening with ColorNeg (I wish it had a better name), and have done a number of back to back scans using my previous methodology. My initial observations are:

- that it would be a lot easier to learn to use ColorNeg that any of the scanner software that I’ve used for a beginner (despite the documentation),

- that none of the scans that I’ve done using the ColorNeg technique was worse than my previous methodology,

- that one (the pic shown above) was much better,

- that I appear to have been right in suspecting the curves applied by Silverfast for my film type are emphasising the grainy look, and

- the process of scanning is a lot easier the ColorNeg way.

In the sample pic, the brighter sleeve was clipping on my previous methodology. Determining whether that was a problem with the negative, the scanner, or the profile would have absorbed quite a lot of time. However, a quick look at the raw scan showed detail, so it was an easy matter to do the inversion and avoid the clip. Also the skin tones on the arm are cleaner in the raw scan version than the Silverfast profile was making them look.

I’ve still got some stuff to work out – for example, when is it best to associate a colour space with the file – and there is lots to learn about the fine control within the inversion/conversion routine, but unless I hit a big snag over the coming days, this looks like the way I’ll be scanning in the future.

One final thought. Although the maths is beyond me, the ColorNeg site contains some interesting information on why the ‘invert’ routine in Photoshop doesn’t do a good job with negatives (I’ve never really understood why people recommend scanning a neg as a positive and then inverting in Photoshop, because I’ve never liked the results). There is also a thread here on the Lightzone forums that has more information.

ColorNeg – recommended for mono :-)

(For info: I was using VueScan to scan the raw files, simply because I knew how to do it. If you don’t, follow the instructions on the ColorNeg site. There are instructions for HP, Nikon, Minolta, and Imacon scan software in addition to VueScan).

Update: Index of related posts

Some related posts chosen by the software:

• Raw scanning and ColorNeg for mono
• ColorNeg for mono – user notes part 1
• Dmax, Dmin, Deranged