I’m not even sure I was doing it right but either way, I got the feeling is was not going to be any easier than using Darktable. I will have done something wrong most likely, and didn’t spend time reading up on it really so my bad. So then I tried RawTherapee and it’s “film simulation” option, only to discover I needed some some other files and so on, which I went and found and downloaded but that didn’t work either. So I attempted a standard negative scan instead of a positive conversion to try and covert the raw negative using Darktable and the “invert” module that comes with it, but even though I attempted to get the colour of the film base with it I still had the same issue – result looked awful.
I thought I must be doing something wrong because Vuescan is awesome.
Repeated a scan with no adjustments for levels or colour but it still looked awful. So I switched it to generic colour negative and set colour balance etc to none. The Vuescan presets for colour film looked awful and seem out of date. Having successfully developed the 10 roles of medium format Kodak Portra 400 using the quite splendid Tetenal C-41 kit, and after leaving my negatives to dry, I hurried up to my Epson V550 to scan them using my preferred tool of choice, VueScan, with the intention of then using DarkTable, as usual, to export final JPEGs. They do a great job of developing it and, crucially for this article, scanning it. Like many of us, I have developed and scanned black and white for years, but I always sent my Kodak Portra 400 to my preferred lab for development and scanning. I write to you as a frustrated and bewildered photographer who only recently attempted home colour development of Kodak Portra 400 film. The sample above is BEFORE and further post-processing in Darktable…just a direct conversion from negative to positive. This article talks about using negative2positive script to automate the conversion of raw Kodak Portra 400 negatives to positive TIFFs, ready for post-processing using Darktable. But I will leave it here for information.
RAWTHERAPEE CONVERT NEGATIVE UPDATE
But it’s a great update, and, you’re welcome as I helped drive this update forward :-) This update has rendered much of this article obsolete, now. I have tried it, and it works, though getting the image to look ‘right’ still requires some effort with the sliders and your own skill. BIG UPDATE AS OF JAN 2023 : Rawtherapee v5.9 has, since I wrote this article, introduced the Negative Converter widget for all kinds of negative scans now, including those acquired from regular flatbad scanners like Epson scanners.
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