One of the great features of Lightroom is that it can work with tiff and jpeg files as well as raw files. Because of this feature, a few years ago I thought I'd try working up film scans I made here in the office on my Nikon Coolscan 8000 (the earlier version of the Coolscan 9000) in Lightroom. The first time I tried it I was really impressed with how much easier it was to work up a rather bland film scan in Lightroom as compared to the same process in Photoshop.

Before I get into it here I thought I would address the whole film thing. These days it is rare to see folks shooting film unless they are fashion shooters for Vanity Fair or GQ. I still do shoot a bit of film - mostly medium format with a Hasselblad. Sometimes I shoot transparency (Fuji Provia 100F is my favorite) and sometimes I am shooting negative film, aka "print" film (Fuji 400 NPH or Kodak Portra 160 and 400 NC). I choose the print film for portraiture or when I want a larger exposure latitude. I find that the transparency films scan much better than any of the negative films. The transparency film scans have much better color accuracy and contrast right out of the scanner. Negative films on the other hand can be a fair bit off in terms of color and white balance when they pop out of the scanner. They usually involve a lot more work to get them to look as they should. And Lightroom is a huge time saver for working up scans from print and transparency film.

At right is the original image without any corrections as it was scanned. This is a scan from a roll of Provia 100F. I have my scanner set up to use my monitor calibration and the Adobe RGB color space. I scan all of my images in 14-bit (the highest bit depth the scanner can record) so that I have plenty of bit depth to massage my images without any posterizing or other detrimental effects. Hence the images (at least the transparency scans) in general come out of the scanner with a high degree of color accuracy - they are just lacking in the contrast department and most of the time also needs some brightness adjustment.

I import the images into Lightroom as with any other images. I can enter metadata on import just as with other images - which saves me a lot of time. And then I can get to work with the images in the Develop Module. Once in the develop module I adjust the contrast, vibrance, saturation, brightness and color temperature just as if I was working on a raw file. You can see my main adjustments in the Lightroom screenshot at right.

I also worked on the blue sky in this scan by increasing the blue saturation just a little and increased the blue luminosity as well. At right is the final image as it came out of Lightroom. Sometimes I do a levels adjustment on the final 16-bit files in Photoshop but this image did not need it. This image is a shot of a Cadillac at Cadillac Ranch just outside of Amarillo, Texas off I-40. I shot a series of "portraits" one evening of each Cadillac at sunset.

As an example of a scan from print film, I have a portrait of a kayaker that I shot on Kodak Portra 160 NC. As you can see from the before image (top image) the film scan as it came out of the scanner is pretty far off in terms of hue and color balance. The kayak and his dry top are actually orange and will need some serious adjusting.

And as you can see in the bottom kayaker image I have been able to adjust the hue, saturation and color balance to get the colors in line on this tough film scan. I have done about as much as is possible with Lightroom 1.4.1. From here I'll have to take it into Photoshop and work on skin tones with localized corrections.

This isn't that great of an image but it just goes to show how powerful Lightroom can be with film scans. And with Lightroom Version 2.0 and it's localized corrections I won't have to go into Photoshop to correct images like this.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael