I’ve largely been unhappy with my process for color correcting C-41 scans so I searched online to see what other people were doing. After going through a few Google pages, I came across a post on iamthejeff.com titled The best way to color correct C-41 negative film scans. In short the author developed a really quick way to color correct C-41 negative scans that from personal experience, seems to work very well. If you’re in need of a similar process, check out the video above where I go through iamthejeff’s process for color correcting C-41 negative film scans.

This process of color correcting C-41 film scans is straight forward, easy to do and quite effective. From my experience with this process so far, it pretty much works with every scan that I’ve thrown at it but there are a few drawbacks. The first being that some scans are a bit more tricky to color correct if there are elements that introduce multiple color shifts to the scene. Really, I don’t put too much fault on this process because images like the last one that I demonstrated on in the video is difficult to edit with any process that I’ve tried. Most processes, like this one, use global adjustments that effect all colors of an image. This will get the job done in most cases but some images will need further refinement with local color adjustments.

Another thing about this process is that it kind of requires the editor to know how a certain scene is supposed to look in terms of color. For example, that last image again. I knew what the jacket was supposed to look like, it’s suppose to be off white. However, using this process I could only get the jacket to look somewhat beige or a light tan. Someone else editing this image may not know better and might stop at that. To me, it’s difficult to color correct with this process without having a good idea of what the colors should be. So in cases where you are not editing your own scans or you just completely forgot what the scene was suppose to look like, things may not look true to life.

Lastly, this is a process that you want to utilize when you want natural accurate tones, not so much for accurately representing a film stock. Think of it this way, some film stocks just inherently have a color shift. Some are just more green or more magenta than others or real life and if you want to accurately represent these film stocks, you have to show the color shift. Unless you have a really good photographic memory for just how much of a certain tint a film stock is supposed to have, it’ll be really hard to represent that with this process. Some other color correction programs utilize an entire database of different film stocks to cross reference in order to make all scans of a film stock look a certain way. That is obviously not the case with this process. Here, we are only looking at each image individually and apply color correction base on how we interpret each image, essentially just eye balling it and making adjustments based on personal preference. So, at the end of the day, all film stocks will largely look like each other in terms of color when using this process. Again, this process should not to be used to accurately represent the colors of a film stock. This process should be used for getting even, natural tones.

At the end of the day though, this is a free process shared for anyone to use. If you don’t like it, no harm done because you didn’t pay anything for it. Me personally, I will probably continue to use this process as a first step to color correct all of my C-41 scans. This process is very fast and it gets me to a place that I’m happy with and can do further adjustments upon. If you’re looking for an easy and fast way to color correct C-41 negative scans, definitely give this process a try.

UPDATE

Unfortunately, the original creator of this method has taken his website down but an archive of it along with a download link of the action can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170702193137/https://www.iamthejeff.com/post/32/the-best-way-to-color-correct-c-41-negative-film-scans

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