Digitizing analog negatives is easier said than done. Black and white film poses no problems, but the orange/amber mask of color negative film is a real headache for photo editors, producing strong and unpredictable colour shifts even from one shot to the next. Capture One’s update promises to fix that with concrete digitizing advice and time-saving negative conversion tools.
If you use a film scanner then color negative conversion probably won’t be a problem because the scanning hardware and software is set up for subtracting this mask from the color values, just as photo labs and chemistry will.
But if you use a camera to digitise your negatives (just like I do), it’s not so easy. Photo editing software is not set up for this kind of process and the tools need to be adapted and configured to cope. It can be done manually when you know the workarounds, but Capture One has streamlined this process with a dedicated negative workspace that applies instant conversions and offers only those tools that are going to work properly with negative images.
You can give the software a head start by standardising your process. For example, you can measure a custom white balance setting from the orange mask on an unexposed frame and then use that same custom setting to capture the whole roll. It’s also a good idea to standardise on a fixed manual exposure – the density range in negatives is well within the tonal range that digital sensors can capture, so you should not have any problems with shadow or highlight detail if you get this right.
Capture One can interface directly with scanners, or you could use a camera copying setup with tethered shooting and a Capture One Session. I don’t use tethered shooting or scanners, so I photographed my negatives directly and brought them in as RAW files, then opened them in the new Film Negative workspace. Note that this is a workspace, not simply an extra tool tab.
The rest is simple – mostly.
- Select an negative image
- Crop out any image border – very important for the conversion process
- Hit the Convert Negative button on the top toolbar
Most of the time you’ll get a good result with decent color accuracy. Sometimes you won’t, but there are workarounds.
The issue is that even with a custom white balance setting, there are still colour impurities which aren’t the same across all three RGB channels. Capture One uses per-channel auto levels settings to iron these out, but the default clipping settings may not go far enough because the color channels may have ‘long tail’ color data in the highlights that influences the conversion.
I got better results by setting the clipping values to 1% in the Capture One settings. These are stored separately for negative conversion, so you’re not going to upset your regular digital edits. 1% clipping sounds aggressive, but it chops off a lot of spurious colour data and the granular nature of analog film means the appearance of highlight detail is preserved unexpectedly well.
If you still see a colour cast, you can fix this by adjusting the Master colour wheel in the Color Editor, dragging the colour in the complementary direction to the cast you see.
Capture One’s new Negative Film workspace uses existing capabilities, notably image inversion – this can also be done by reversing curves adjustments – and per channel levels adjustments. The difference is that it makes the process quick and streamlined. You’ll probably struggle with colour shifts now and again, but far less than before and you’ll also be armed with a bit more information on how to fix it and the best tools to use.
It’s a great update which will be useful both to analog fans still shooting film today, and photographers with an archive of analog captures that they’d like to carry on using.
