Wednesday Landscapes, 30 August 2017

You are invited to upload one or more of your landscape photos and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on? And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

 

I’m still scanning, and I’m finding color negatives to be a lot more challenging than slides—it seems to take a lot of fiddling to get the colors right. But I think I got them to work on this one, and it illustrates one of the rewards of scanning: scanning saved the image from the trash-heap it had landed on as a color print. I’d been only 15% successful in shading the lens, so the upper left corner was free of flare. If I’d been totally successful or totally unsuccessful, it would have worked…but 15% was a glaring (or non-glaring) non-starter. So there was a lot of post-processing on this one—first to reconstruct the overall colors, contrast, and sharpness in Lightroom; then into Photoshop to remove the film scratches and dust that remained after a light application of the Plustek 8200i+Vuescan dust and scratch removal, and then cloning at a variety of opacities to add sunbeams and flare in the erstwhile crystal-clear upper left-hand corner and upper center of the frame. This was a Fujicolor Superia 200 negative, and I probably used the Olympus point-and-shoot that I usually had in my pocket.

 

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Very nice. I really like what you did with this scan, Leslie.

Leslie - There is a recent PNet discussion at Scanning color negatives with intention of conversion to BW that indicates that ColorPerfect software would be good for scanning color negatives. I have never used the software, but would be interested to see reports from those who have used it.

Fantastic Glenn !! You roaming about the Western Wheat Lands with the view cameras? Bill

Bill - Thanks for the compliment, but no, I have not used my view camera for a few years. I need to get back to it someday. I used my new Canon 5D IV with my usual 24-105mm L lens to take the photo.

Here's a shot from East Aurora, Colorado, looking back toward the Rocky Mountains before sunset. "The Land" is a development stage, faith community. We're in early stages of development and introducing other to the concept, which includes an edible labyrinth, which we'd be laying out, so that others could visualize the concept. Anyway, there was lots of bending over and hammering, but we saw this when we looked up near the end of our work:

 

God's Rays Revisited by David Stephens, on Flickr

 

There are powerline between the property and the mountain, so I zoomed out to 222mm to cut most of them out, then used a Healing Brush to in LR to erase the last remnant. Crepuscular rays helped layer the mountains and a 2:1 crop gave a wide angle look to the long lens.

Early morning from my canoe.

Gobi Desert with Camels. Nikon FE, 50mm F/1.8, Fuji Provia 100.

 

Topi on topography

 

Serengeti, Tanzania

scape with land and extras: falling water, still water, and puffins.

 

I really like what you did with this scan

Many thanks, Julie! I have to admit that this new ability to rehabilitate film photos gone wrong is a two-edged sword: (1) I start treating them a bit more like paintings than photographs, and (2) I have a nearly unlimited supply of old photos gone wrong…

ColorPerfect software would be good for scanning color negatives

Thanks for the suggestion, Glenn, and the link to the scanning thread. I’ve been using Lightroom, Photoshop, and sometimes Color Perfect; I’ve also tried doing the color correction within Vuescan. I can tell that CP has a lot of potential, but I’m still low on the learning curve. I’d been hoping that the CP film profiles would solve the problem, but that hasn’t worked as well as I’d hoped. At this point, I’m doing most of the work in Lightroom, with basic adjustments using the white balance sliders and individual channel tone curves (mostly to add red), then fine-tuning with the hue, saturation, and luminance sliders for individual colors where needed. I’ve made some presets that work pretty well, but some frames are still way off—the usual problem is that I can get either the blues or the yellows to look right, but not both unless I adjust the individual hues (often cooling the blues and warming the yellows--something I haven't figured out how to do with the usual binary R,G, and B controls). I suspect there had been a lot more adjustments made for the original prints than I’d been aware of.

I have a lot of color negs and chromes, which I have been scanning with Vuescan for over 10 years now. Transparencies seem to be easier, color-wise. I've had some color negs that were just impossible! Here is a scan of a medium format 2 1/4 Ektachrome slide shot with a Bronica.

I've had some color negs that were just impossible

Steve, it was your really nice scanned photo (link) in the 9 August landscape thread that got me started on this scanning binge—thanks for the inspiration. I’m also trying to start off with the flat Vuescan scan you mentioned in that thread (I'm using "generic color negative," neutral WB, 16 bit color channels, ProPhoto RGB; occasional minor shifting of the white point—is that similar to what you’re using?). Have you been able to figure out a pattern to which color negative scans are the most difficult to correct the color on?

Hi Leslie. I am using similar settings on Vuescan. I'm using both an Epson 2450 flatbed scanner which does medium and large format negs and transparencies, and a Minolta Scan Dual 3 for 35mm. I admit, I do more black and white neg scanning of all formats, than color. I just had a color neg that I simply could not get even close to normal for some reason. It was 35mm fuji color film from the 80's. I did this one I'm posting now, on the Epson taken with medium format 6x7 Pentax on color film. I got the color close, but there is still some odd color cast that I can't seem to get right. I'm not an expert with color scanning.

Here's a shot from East Aurora, Colorado, looking back toward the Rocky Mountains before sunset. "The Land" is a development stage, faith community. We're in early stages of development and introducing other to the concept, which includes an edible labyrinth, which we'd be laying out, so that others could visualize the concept. Anyway, there was lots of bending over and hammering, but we saw this when we looked up near the end of our work:

 

God's Rays Revisited by David Stephens, on Flickr

 

There are powerline between the property and the mountain, so I zoomed out to 222mm to cut most of them out, then used a Healing Brush to in LR to erase the last remnant. Crepuscular rays helped layer the mountains and a 2:1 crop gave a wide angle look to the long lens.

 

David, there's an East Aurora near Buffalo, NY - my home town. It looks nothing like this!