Scanning film negatives with Capture One

A more and more popular method to scan negatives is to use a digital camera. There are many examples around the web on how to do that, from an hardware perspective. It usually involves a DSLR or mirrorless camera, a macro lens, a backlight and some sort of stand. Just as an example, here is my own way of scanning film rolls, using an Olympus OM-D EM-5 II, a Raspberry Pi and Lego bricks:

But what about the software?

Lightroom users can enjoy the excellent Negative Lab Pro but what if you’re a Capture One user?

In this article, I’m going to show step by step how to invert a negative in Capture One.

Why use Capture One to invert a negative?

The are many good reasons to do that:

1. You manage all your photos in Capture One, and you don’t want a separate flow for your analog photos.
2. You don’t want to pay for extra software.
3. You want to benefit from the flexibility of the raw processing. If you use another software such as FilmLab, you only get a jpeg or tiff.
4. You want full control over the inversion process.

Step-by-step guide to inversion

0. Preliminary step: change the channel mode

As we are going to work on each channel red, green blue independently, we need to change the channel mode accordingly. Go to Preferences > Exposure and change “Channel Mode” to “Red, Green and Blue Channels”:

Change the channel mode

Don’t forget to put it back to RGB Channel afterward or you might have surprises when you process digital images.

1. Set the white balance

The first step is to neutralize the orange color of the film mask itself. Do that by setting the white balance on a non-exposed part of the film:

Set the white balance on the orange mask

2. Crop to keep the image only

Crop so that the mask is no longer included in the frame. Why do that? The mask completely changes the histogram, and for the inversion process we must focus on the histogram of the actual photo.

The histogram before…

Before cropping

…and after cropping

See how the rightmost part disappeared

You photo should look like this:

The cropped image

If you want to include the mask or anything outside of the photo frame in your final output, feel free to change the crop once the inversion has been done.

3. Use a linear response curve

We don’t want to have Capture One use a gamma curve which will interfere with inversion process, so use a linear response curve:

Switch to linear response

4. Automatic level adjustement

In the level tool, click on the “Auto Adjust Level” tool:

Look for this button

The automatic adjustment

5. Invert!

That’s what you’re here for: the actual inversion.

5.1 Method 1: Using the Levels

Once again in the level panel, go through each channel red, green and blue (not the “RGB” levels!) and exchange the maximum and minimum values:

The photo will go through all kinds of colors in the process

5.2 Method 2: Using the Curve

The alternative is to use the Curve tool: simply go to the RGB curve and move the bottom left point to the top left and the bottom right point to the top right.

5.3 Which method to choose?

The Levels method is easier to script, so if you have a Mac, you can use the script at the end of the page to automate this.

The Curve method can easily be saved to a new layer and saved in a style (or get the one given as Bonus 2 at the bottom of this article). So if you’re doing it manualy or on Windows, choose this option!

5.4 Look at the result

That’s it! You should get something like that:

6. Adjust the white balance (Optional)

Depending on your backlight, the film or the image itself, the white balance might appear slightly off. Adjust it carefully, with very small increments.

7. Adjust the curve (Optional)

To give it a bit more contrast, adjust the curve to your liking. The amount of correction depends a lot on the film you’re processing.

Increase the contrast with an “S” curve

You can also use other tools such as contrast, exposure, shadow recovery… However, there’s a trick: many of those tools are applied before the levels inversion, so their behavior is reverted! Try by yourself to see what’s working and what’s not.

The final result

Bonus: automate with a script (using the levels)

If you’re using Capture One on MacOS, it’s possible to script the steps 2 to 5.

Download this file and put it in the scripts folder of Capture One (accessible through Scripts > Open Scripts Folder):

Bonus 2: Style to invert the curve (step 5)

All the other steps have to be done manually.

Save this file as “Invert.costyle” and import it into Capture One.

That’s it!

Thanks for reading!