Capture One’s New Film Negative Conversion - A First Look
The most recent version of Capture One added a rather interesting new toolset: the ability to work with film negatives. The software now includes the ability to work directly with scanned negatives and handles the conversion process directly in Capture One. This is specifically designed for camera scanning, and is similar to “Negative Lab Pro” for Lightroom, although there are some differences.
In this video, I take a first look at the new Film Negative conversion tools and I walk you through the process of converting negatives and show you a little trick for getting better colour. This isn’t a tutorial, but more of a demonstration. Capture One actually has a pretty good tutorial on their website if you want to check it out.
I talk a good bit about negative lab pro in this video. To be honest, I think that is still better than these features. The main reason for this is that Negative Lab Pro includes proper colour profiles for various film types, whereas this feature in Capture One relies on doing an Auto Levels to solve the negative backing problem. However, one advantage is Capture One’s Match Look tool, which allows you to match the colour of another image. If you got low resolution scans from the Lab when you got your film processed, you can use these as a colour reference with the match look tool, making colour matching a lot easier.
The really interesting thing here is that this is yet another sign of a growing resurgence in film. DXO recently added film conversion tools to DXO Film Pack too. We also just got the news of Eastman Kodak bringing out two new films, which are essentially Portra, but it’s interesting as they are bringing it back in-house to Eastman Kodak. (The previous Portra films were distributed by Kodak Alaris - essentially a venture capital firm which had Kodak’s rights) Unfortunately film and processing is still prohibitively expensive, so I won’t be showing that much any time soon, but it’s good to see things going in the right direction.
