Curves for What Ails You

Curves for What Ails You

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To fix an overly blue image taken in sunlight with the camera set for indoor lighting, download Daylight-to-Incandescent-RGB, create a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop, and load the curve.

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To fix an image taken indoors with the camera set for sunlight, download Incandescent-to-Daylight-RGB.acv, create a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop, click the Load button, and load the curve.

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To fix the sun burnt or flushed look that afflicts skin tones for many digital cameras, download cp880-flash-sunburn.asv.

To use this color adjustment, click on Photoshop's "Image>Adjust>Selective Color" command, and load the .asv file. Use a correction layer, if you have PhotoShop version 5 or later.

This operation works with any full version of PhotoShop. Many thanks to Michael Deloughery and Anders Karlsson and for providing test images.

To copy and invert color negatives using a digicam:

Use daylight or a relatively cool light to illuminate the negs, not tungsten, or your blue channel will be dark and noisy. Copy all your negs with the same exposure if possible, using any fixed white balance setting - indoor is good. Don't rely on the camera's autoexposure or auto white balance.
Copy one negative with known pure white and clear orange mask - the film leader has this - now you know why the processor has been returning this piece to you all these years :-).
Create a curves layer, and click the white eyedropper on an area of pure orange mask, and the black eyedropper on a maximum black section of negative. Invert the ends of the RGB curve.
Save the curve and use it to invert your other images to a positive. You will probably need to make slight adjustments to the first image's curves, then save the resulting curve and use it to process your remaining negatives.

Here's another, very thorough discussion of how to invert a negative.

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