A Routine for Scanning and Processing Negative Film

Scanning negative film can be immensely tedious. If you wish to attempt it yourself and don’t have access to a means of applying accurate colour profiles, then presented in this post is a summary of my Photoshop workflow to achieve desirable (by my current standards) results.

Using your scanning software (I use Vuescan), scan the negative as you would a positive using completely neutral colour and contrast settings. Save as a 16 bit/channel TIFF image. I’ve often found Vuescan’s film profiles to be horrible – particularly for the recent batch of medium format Kodak Ektar I’ve been trying – so I stay away from them.

In Photoshop, invert the image. Note the blue mask from the orange base of the film – this is different for every film hence the need for profiles.

Set the black point by using a curves layer. In the pop-up box change the display to show clipping and using the black dropper, keep redefining the black point until there is only a very small amount of clipping.

Set middle grey using a levels layer. In tandem, adjust the input levels slider for white (while checking the histogram for clipping) and define middle grey with the dropper. I’ve used an arrow to point to my selection.

Adjust contrast to taste with another curves layer.

With a small rotation and removal of dust, this is the final result. Note that I’ve stayed away from colour balance layers – they ask for trouble.

Feedback is welcomed. If you scan your own film and use this, or a variant of this routine, I’d be interested to hear about it.

Layer Masks and Transparency Gradients for “The Heart”

This tutorial will cover digital blending in Photoshop CS3 using layer masks and transparency gradients. It is aimed at those who are interested in seeking alternatives to HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing.

I would consider the usage of these techniques as digital graduated neutral density filters and although it can take some time to implement, I find the benefits to be:

• Preservation of intended colour and tone
• Complete control over contrast gradients
• Elimination of halo effects
• Elimination of fringing

I will use one of my photographs, The Heart, to illustrate the method.

1. Download this zipped folder containing the two images to be used for blending and open IMG_1166 in Photoshop.

2. Press Ctrl+Shift+N and click OK to add a new layer. To place IMG_1164 on this layer go to File > Place and locate it. Click the tick to commit the transform.

3. To create a mask, click the New Layer Mask (grey square with white circle inside) button in the Layers palette. To create a transparency gradient on this mask, first hit G to bring up the gradient toolbar and select a linear gradient. Then click and drag as shown in the following picture.

4. The next layer will be a photo filter so click Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Photo Filter and hit OK. Push the density slider to 100% and select a custom colour with properties as shown in the following picture.

5. Now apply another layer mask and gradient, as done previously, to restrict the photo filter to the sky. Change the blend mode to Linear Burn and opacity to 70% for the following picture. The Linear Burn blend mode is similar to Color Burn, but instead of increasing contrast, it decreases brightness to darken the base color and reflect the blend color.

Now add curves layers to the foreground and then the sky.

6. For the foreground, click Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves and hit OK. Then modify each of the RGB channels to reflect something like the following picture.

7. Change the blend mode to soft light and add a layer mask and gradient (this time in reverse) to restrict the curves layer to the foreground. This will produce the following result.

The curves layer that targets the sky looks like this.

8. Change the blend mode again to soft light, opacity to 75% and create a layer mask and gradient to achieve the following result.

9. The final step involves adding a levels layer and changing its blend mode to screen to boost the lighter areas. An opacity of 90% will achieve the picture shown below.

Straightening the horizon and correcting the barrel distortion yields The Heart as displayed at the top of this page. Serena Ho attempted the tutorial and her result is posted here. It would be great to see some other results as well.

Photographing the Milky Way with a standard DSLR camera

This tutorial will cover the development of my image Milky Way from Apollo Bay using a Canon 350D, a wide angle lens, Adobe Photoshop and an image alignment program called hugin.

For this to be repeatable you must be shooting with clear dark skies, free from light pollution.  I used settings of Tv: 20 sec, Av: f/4, focal length: 17mm and ISO speed: 1600. A shutter release cable is also a great tool and can keep your camera clicking as it sits on the tripod. The more images taken, the better for the final result, because this will improve the signal to noise ratio that plagues digital sensors during long exposures. A tracking mount is not necessary with a 20 second shutter speed because the rotation of the night sky is undetectable at such a wide angle.

Please read the following steps for more information. All images are hyperlinked to larger sizes.

1. Download this zipped folder containing four of my unaligned shots of the Milky Way.

2. Load them into hugin_0.7_beta_4 .

3. Manually align images with control points – don’t automatically align. I aligned three images to a common one. Enlarge the screenshot for details.

4. Click Edit – fine tune all points.

5. Click View – preview window.

6. Click Center and Fit buttons to achieve this view:

7. Click Edit – Optimise.

8. Click Stitcher – image format – multiple tiff. Final screen before clicking Stitch Now.

9. If you don’t want to worry about learning how to align the images with hugin, then you can download this zipped folder containing the four prealigned images of the Milky Way.

10. Load each image onto a new layer in photoshop adjusting the blend mode to screen which is good at lightening images without lightening the darkest areas.

11. Add a medium contrast curves layer.

12. Add a colour balance layer: shadows (-90,-25,-10), midtones (-15,-5,-20), highlights (0,-5,30).

13. The final result.

For comparison’s sake, shown below is a typical accompanying jpeg to a raw file I began with for one of the individual images. I used Adobe Camera Raw to extract the jpegs provided in step 1 for processing.

In closing, I’d like to point out this is not the only way an image like this can be captured; there is myriads of possibilities. I have developed this simple and inexpensive method by just experimenting with the tools at my disposal.