Ah, the travails of film scanning continue. I shot a roll of black and white images last weekend and Silverfast kept delivering pitch black images. It was very frustrating and is probably user error. But this process should not be so hard! So I returned to DSLR scanning. My D850 is in the shop for a repair to the LCD screen so I used my Nikon D500. I used a copy stand purchased on Ebay. Aside from the balky camera mount, the unit is adequate.
My first attempt with inversion was using Lightroom. This was a disaster. The colors were completely off. After a half hour of fiddling with the tone curves I gave up. Then I remembered having purchased a program called Film Lab to process scans.
I imported the images into the program, selected all of them, and clicked to convert negative color film. Voila, I had good colors and files that were easily tweaked without a lot of hassle. This is a good program if you encounter the same frustrations I have.
Here are three images from the effort. The first two are straight conversions (the images are cropped to varying degrees) with very minor edits to colors. The third image is de-saturated for a vintage feel. I do like the overall vintage vibe of the images.
Having said this, I am inclined to have my film processed by my great local lab. I developed this color film myself with decent results. This scanning thing is giving me fits.
The mannequin is a permanent resident on the porch of my dear and loyal friend Alayne White. Alayne is an awesome person who relishes life and people. She has great insight that has helped me often.
