It must be Monday, because Michael Fraser just rendered my entire color film scanning workflow obsolete in one post:
I decided to try to improve upon the process, and to develop an entirely Photoshop-based process for colour negative scans. The three conditions for a successful process were:
Output as good as — or better than — what ColorPerfect can produce (it goes without saying that image quality should be the primary concern),
The ability to batch at least part of the process (it’ll never be ‘set and forget’, but if an entire roll could be ingested into Photoshop and at least inverted, with an easy way to finish the colour balancing, I’d be ok with that), and
Frame-to-frame reproducibility.
I’m intrigued to see where this ends. Judging by his results with the test image, it’s going to be a substantial improvement over my current Vuescan + ColorPerfect method.
The biggest shortcoming of the ColorPerfect approach, as Michael clearly states, is the lack of image-to-image reproducibility. This drives me nuts and if Michael’s new workflow does away with it — even if it’s just partly — it will be a solid win in my book.