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Black & White negatives in Darktable

During a couple of development / scanning cycles I’ve been less than satisfied with the result from my scans - so I started to revise my Darktable methods.

With the help of an AI-agent, yes I use AI when it feels relevant, I found a procedure that seems to render a lot better results than my previous.

The method described in Black and White negatives in Darktable just isn’t up to par!

Here is a comparison of the same negative and scan processed with two different work-flows. The first one (the more purple/red one) is the old way, the secound (more black and white) is the new way.

As you can see the new method results in a lot more punch and contrast - I have not done anything but apply my template to the image, I know it could use some tweaking but thats not what this post is about.

The new way

This is what I do

You need:

  1. A photo of your light source without any negative in front - for white balance
  2. A piece of unexposed negative (like the part around the holes or the end-piece)
  3. At least one photo (exposed negative) to process, and use for the template

One time setup

First we need to disable some of darktable’s automatic features.

  1. Search for the module “exposure” (in the module-list on the right) and turn it off (the “power” icon)
  2. do the same for “color calibration”
  3. lastly do the same for “sigmoid”

Now, if you don’t want to do this every time you can save it as a “style” by clicking the Very small icon at the bottom-right of the history-panel, looks like three rings.

After that you can apply the style to all selected images in the lighttable-view via the styles panel on the right side - or at the image your working on by the same icon but att the bottom left of the image.

Presets

For whitebalance

Open the module and use the pipette-tool on the image of your light source - save as preset, name it after the light source.

For negadoctor:

Unexposed film:
  1. Under the “Film Properties"-tab
    1. Use the pipette for “color of the film base” on an unexposed area of a negative.
    2. do the same for “scan exposure bias”
  2. Under the “Corrections"-tab
    1. Use the pipette for “shadows color cast” on an unexposed area of a negative.
  3. Under the “Print properties"-tab
    1. Use the pipette for “paper black (density correction)” on an unexposed area of a negative.
Exposed film:
  1. Under the “Film Properties"-tab
    1. Use the pipette for “D max” on an exposed image, the complete image.
  2. Under the “Corrections"-tab
    1. Use the piptte for “highlights white balance” on an exposed image, the complete image.
  3. Under the “Print properties"-tab
    1. Use the piptte for “print exposure adjustment” on an exposed image, the complete image.

Save this as a preset - name it after the film-stock.

Now, applying these to presets will be most of the work you need to do. The monochrome-module might come in handy, so might the exposure-module.