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Hi. Has anyone tried to use Colorwash to improve scanned photo negatives (particularly color)? Thanks.

ColorWasher wasn't developed to work on negatives, so you should better convert the negatives to positives before using ColorWasher.

Do you have any particular reason for processing negatives?

I use it to fix color on scanned negatives (which are of course positives in photoshop). The color correction works well... just wish it worked on 16 bit color so I didn't have to downsample them. I find the density of negatives or any scanned film for that matter really needs all the bits you can get to get the most out of them.


Theresa

There will be a Pro version of ColorWasher in future which will suport 16 bit and also have many new features. So until then you will have to live with the 8 bit version.

From my tests I couldn't see any visible differences between an image processed with ColorWasher in 8 bit and 16 bit mode.

Hi,

Once I scanned a very bad negative that was damaged by laying outside in the grass for who knows for how long. The photo showed people on a parking place and the people were wearing pretty old fashioned clothes.
Anyway, I scanned the negative at maximum optical resolution (1200dpi), inversed the colors in Photoshop and ran ColorWasher on it. The result was impressing. The only thing ColorWasher couldn't fix was to mask the big scratches and a gradiental color cast in the photo. ColorWasher is number one in dealing with color casts but only if the color cast is about the same in the whole picture (e.g. blue cast on daylight photos and yellow cast in domestic (artificial light conditions) photos. The gradiental color cast in the photo I tried to fix really turned from overall cyan to reddish/ orange in the two bottom corners. So I focussed on the overall cyan cast to correct the photo with ColorWasher and just took the (final) reddish bottom corners for granted. Anyway ColorWasher does a great job as long as you first turn the negative image to a positive one. Wheather you use the auto features (calibrated for positive photos) or change the controls manually (you can't see what you're doing with negative previews).

Roberto