Processing old, scanned color negatives

[conrad2k]

I haves used my dSLR to photograph b&w negatives for a while as a quick way to get good quality scans. It's so much quicker than using my film scanned and gives me a Nikon RAW file to process. Recently I was asked to scan some 64 year old medium format color negatives. The negatives are probably faded because it's hard to get realistic color back in them, They also have a lot of dust spots, which I can remove with the in-painting brush, but it it slow and tedious. Does any one have tips on restoring color negatives in Affinity Photo?

[DWright]

Hi conrad2k,

 

is it possible for you to send me a sample image so that I can investigate further, If you wish you can private message me the file.

[cadobir]

What about the Spot Healing brush?

[R C-R]

I have no experience with this but I would think using a camera instead of a good film scanner would be undesirable, at least for color negatives (or slides) because:

 

1) The camera could introduce parallax/perspective errors unless a long lens was used & care was taken so that the film & camera sensor planes were normal to each other (no relative tilt) & 

2) The color source illuminating the negative could introduce color shifts if it was not a full spectrum (black body radiator) white light.

 

Of course, whatever image capture method used, safely removing as much dust from the negatives prior to capture is always helpful, so the old school white cotton gloves, blower brush or canned air routine can't hurt, right?

[conrad2k]

R C-R

Sadly, my Plustek film scanner can't handle anything larger than 35mm. I started fiddling with this because relatives found old boxes of medium format negatives (120 film in various aspect ratios). That said, I have gotten some surprisingly good results photographing newer 35mm color slides. Very comparable to the scanner, much quicker and smaller file size than the scanner's huge TIFFs.

 

You are correct, I do have to be careful not to introduce distortion from the sensor and negative not being parallel. I use a 100mm macro lens and a shoot at f/8 which seems to help.

 

Interesting point about color shift. I have been using a speedlight as my light source. I hadn't considered how that might interact with the film. It's not a problem with the black & white negatives, but color film has its white balance baked in usually people bought "daylight" if I remember correctly. I should try filtering the speedlight and see what happens.

 

I do use canned air, but these are old negatives so spots and scratches abound. The in-painting tool is getting a lot of use.

[cadobir]

I'm pretty sure, based on years of experience, that spotting dust and scratches remains a largely manual task. Filters such as "Dust and Scratches" introduce artifacts. Some times you can select dust by color range and run a filter; sometimes you can lift an area of the image to a new layer, set it to Darken or Lighten and move it to cover dust and scratches.

 

Now for the other aspects of restoration, you want to find and correct your black, white and gamma points; fine-tune color and contrast; retouch damaged or missing image areas; introduce clarity, and sharpen. Shadow-Highlight is very useful.