![]() I started shooting film in 2006 and was scanning myself since 2010 using Plustek 7600. There was a pause in 2011-2016 but since then I’m back in the film game, actively shooting it and using both labs and scanning at home. Over the years I’ve used the following software for doing it: As you know, inversion of color negatives can be tricky. In the process I’ve ditched the Plustek and switched to DSLR scanning using Nikon D750/macro lens/home built scanning rig. I thought I was doing fine until I noticed that, if I was being honest with myself, colors on my conversions looked bad and different software from the list above, while giving different results, provided just different shades of mediocrity (if I may cite Simon & Garfunkel!). It’s not that I was ignorant and didn’t read their manuals/forums/tutorials. When you spent money on it, for sure you try to study them better.Īll of this ended when I’ve discovered free (open source actually) raw converter RawTherapee which has negative inversion tool built in. The negative tool in RawTherapee is not a plugin, it’s a fully native built-in tool so it’s not working within the limits of the host software’s plugin API, like Lightroom based solutions do.The program offers the following key advantages when working with DSLR-scanned color negatives: I’ve realized that now I’m able to get the results that actually look better than all of the tools above and I’m doing fine without them. It means that after you’ve applied the negative inversion to your RAW, all the other controls of RawTherapee work like they should as if the picture was originally positive, i.e. The negative tool uses interesting approach for its work.when you work with white balance, you work with native positive values, not with white balance of orange negative mask, the same goes with curves & other adjustments. It’s based not on blindly analyzing/guessing what the inverted image should look like without any input from your side - it uses math to deduce the correct color correction coefficients based on two sample points you specify that you want to treat as being neutral gray. All the edits you do are non-destructive, the image inside stays just the same non-inverted raw.Sure, I know Silverfast HDR has something similar when you can pick up to 4 neutral points and Vuescan has its right click for selecting middle gray, but in my practice RawTherapee still works better. ![]() ![]() All the processing settings are stored in the sidecar human readable (and editable) text files. There’s no any catalog involved, just the raw’s and the sidecars.
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