Positive or Negative

I would ask why you use three different apps to do what PL can do in one?

Why not open the scanned tiff in PL4 straightaway? It can do everything that the others do, better and, since PL4 is non-destructive, and can remove dust as well.

@mikemyers & @Joanna
I will try to create a short video & add the source files (it would take few days, here in Israel we are on the holidays season right now)
You could edit them in PL4 and compare.
Since it’s tiff, you can’t use the Prime NR all you can use is the HQ NR. I realized that Define gave me better results. Moreover, in Define you have negative control points which helps you to disable NR in certain areas. In PL5 it’s a global adjustment.
About color cast- again color efex pro>remove color cast, removes it in one touch.
The most common issues with old negatives scanned on flatbed scanner, are these grains or noise and sometimes color cast.
After editing these two, I can keep on with PL4

I’m curious about everything, so I am interested in what ‘cohen5538’ will be posting, but my plans are to scan it (with settings I have yet to investigate, for color), and move it directly into PL4.

If I were to use Tiff, I’d need to keep the original, scanned negative, then the modified scanned image using Nik, and that last image would then be modified by PL4 so I have the “original image after Tiff” and a list of corrections. I’m sure I’ll remember all this the next days, or weeks, but a year from now I’ll have no idea about what I had done.

I don’t know enough about these things to comment, but if I was going to use Nik, wouldn’t I be better off scanning the color negative, opening it in PL4, and from within PL4 sending it off to Nik (if there was a good reason to do so)?

I have two orders of color negative film arriving this week. By the end of the week I hope to try all this, but there’s no hurry. The more I delay, the more I learn about what I’ll be needing to do.

I’d still like to see some of your finished results, if you can post a few.

I just tried Dfine2 on an old tiff scan of a 5" x 4" neg. I’m sorry to say but I found it very difficult to use, not being able to see what the control points are meant to be affecting and not really seeing any significant difference before and after.

Likewise, Color Efex Pro really didn’t “float my boat” either. I found the UI nowhere near as intuitive as PL, but that may be because PL is much more familiar to me.

I opened the file in PL4 to start with and then used the Nik Collection button to export to Dfine2 and Color Efex Pro and found that, each time, it created yet another copy of the tiff file each time. Not something I would want to be doing on a regular basis. Possibly the Nik tools might be useful as plug-ins for Photoshop but, with PL? Not for me.

But thanks for the ideas.

That would have been the way I would have worked if it didn’t mean all those duplicates. Especially the 1GB file for the Color Efex version :flushed:

I was already losing interest in Nik Collection, and then someone here (Platypus? Wolfgang?) asked why I’m using a whole collection of corrections, rather than just doing them individually (in PL4). I’ve started to think that using Nik Collection is like pressing the (AUTO) button, and I have lost control of my image.

I have a version of Nik that I bought from DxO a year or two ago, and I have the original Google Nik Collection tools that I downloaded from one of the many websites that still allow a download. Since it was a free program released by Google, why buy it from other sources? …and now I’m not sure why I should ever use their “batch” corrections. For better or worse, I am trying to do as much as I can in PL4.

I will probably have a roll of color negative film ready to scan by a week from this Monday - not sure which film I will try first. Probably the “Kodak Gold 200”, not very exciting, but hopefully good for starting out. I will post the Tiff file here after scanning it, before I do anything to it. It will probably be a city scene of Miami taken in early morning, nothing exotic. By then I will have read through this ‘pdf’ file to hopefully give me a starting point for all the VueScan settings.

https://www.hamrick.com/files/revguide.pdf

First goal - make the image look like what I have gotten back from CVS pharmacy in s standard print.
Second goal - make the image look as good as I know how, and hopefully get feedback on how to improve.

Replace ‘might’ with ‘are’ and ‘Photoshop’ with ‘Affinity Photo’, and I whole heartedly agree.

EDITED TO ADD:
The reason the NIK tools work well in PS / AFP is because, fundamentally, they are plug-ins for PS and PS is a pixel based editor whereas PL is a very different beast, it is fundamentally a RAW convertor.

@Joanna you got the 1GB file because you have worked on Nik 3 by DXO version.
They added a feature of non destructive in nik. One of the worst implementations I have ever seen.
They use a multilayer Tiff file which is actually many Tiff files packed together.
Well it lets you go back and re-edit but you end up with giant files…
I am using the free version of Nik (Nik2012 by Google) don’t think Dxo made any major improvement even with Nik4. Just added some filters and improved UI. For a package of software since 2012 it’s just cosmetic improvement for me.

… is an option, not mandatory

@Wolfgang
Yes, but still not the most convenient solution.

@Joanna @mikemyers

As promised
Here is a link to a video with my workflow for:

  1. Noise reduction
  2. Removing color cast
    Again, mostly for very old negatives.

The Folder includes video, source files and edited files. You can download the files and edit them in PL
(If there is any problem with accessing the files within the folder, let me know. I will add separate link for each file)

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1lbqSjD65zipM2Auqn-DwmwBsvPw7RUka

***** Compared again the results of Nik to PL4**. Don’t know why but it seems to be quite identical :slight_smile: , Anyway just noticed to a slider in PL4 which I didn’t pay much attention to it while editing my digital camera photos. it’s the color rendering slider you can select “positive film” and select type of film, it does magic

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Thank you for your detailed video demonstration! – There is also a webinar with Joseph Linaschke
DxO Webinar: Precise noise reduction with control points using Dfine - YouTube

DFine is an old piece of software, which works on JPEGs and TIFF-files and as such can be used for noise reduction after scanning – best to use it locally with control points or color ranges or masks on layers (PS, AP).

Thanks @Wolfgang , I will watch this video.
After having some tests and comparisons today I realized that sometimes this local tools for NR in Define, could really help for non raw files.