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Workflow: Editing Color Negative Film

August 22, 2026

I've spent the last two years developing a workflow for editing color negative and black and white negative film. For much of that time the workflow was evolving constantly and undergoing occasional paradigm shifts. At long last the workflow has gone unchanged for a few months. I'll take this occasion to document the workflow for color negative film. In a future post I'll document the workflow for black and white negative film, which is only slightly different.

Overview of Workflow

Let's start with a high-level overview of the workflow.

1. Development - Develop the color film at home using the C-41 process.
2. Scanning - Scan the film negatives to create digital negatives.
3. White balance - Set the white balance of the digital negatives in the image editing software.
4. Inversion - Invert the digital negatives into positive images.
5. Contrast - Adjust the luminance levels of the highlights, midtones, and shadows to get the contrast you want.
6. Color - Adjust color saturation levels.

This isn't the literal step-by-step sequence of what I do. It's a description of the key transformations I do to the negatives during the workflow. I'll go over the step-by-step workflow later in the post.

Development

I love developing color negative film at home, but I won't go into much detail about the process in this post. I want to focus on the digital editing side instead. For now, I'll give you the basic process I use for developing.

[IMAGE OF DEVELOPING STATION]

1. Mix the powders from a CineStill Cs41 developing kit to get a bottle of developer and a bottle of bleach/fixer.
2. Fill a plastic bin with a few gallons of tap water. Put a sous-vide cooker in the water and set it to 103º.
3. Put the bottles of developer and bleach/fixer into the bin of water and let them up come to temperature for 30-60 minutes.
4. Load the roll of film onto a developing reel and put it into a developing tank.
5. Follow CineStill's instructions for developing the roll. This involves pouring the chemicals into the tank, setting timers, and inverting the tank at regular intervals. It's pretty straightforward.
6. Take the developed roll out of the tank and hang it to dry for a couple hours.

[IMAGE OF ROLLS HANGING TO DRY]

You can totally do this at home and get fantastic results! You do have to buy dedicated equipment like a film changing bag (if you don't have access to a pitch black room), developing reel, developing tank, and sous-vide cooker. You can get all of that for under $200, and you'll quickly save that much money by developing several rolls yourself at home versus paying a lab to develop them.

Scanning

Scanning of film negatives is a large topic that deserves its own post. I'll explain the steps of my scanning workflow, but I won't go into too much detail.

There are two common ways people scan their negatives: with a flatbed scanner or with a digital camera. There are pros and cons of each. I use the digital camera method because I have a nice digital camera.

The equipment I use from the bottom to the top is:

• Raleno light source
• Essential Film Holder
• Nikkor Micro 60mm lens
  • A macro lens is necessary to get sharp close up shots of the negatives.
• Sony FX30 mirrorless camera
• SmallRig tiny tripod

These are the steps of my workflow:

• Set the light source to a temperature of 5600 and full brightness.
• Place the film holder on top of the light bed.
• Mount camera on the tripod and position it facing down onto the film.
• Ensure plane of the digital camera lens is parallel with the plane of the film negative in the holder. Adjust the height of the camera so that the negative fills up 90% of the frame. That gives you a little wiggle room when positioning each film negative.
• Set the lens to its widest aperture.
• Set the white balance of the camera based on the light coming directly from the light source. Do this before putting film into the holder.
• Set the camera to shoot in raw. Set the ISO to the base ISO.
• Prepare the film by blowing off any dust. If there are water spots on the film from development, fog them up with your breath and wipe away the spots with a microfiber cloth.
• Feed negatives into holder.
• Zoom in on the image in your camera and turn on focus peaking. Adjust the focus to be as sharp as you can get it.
• Set the lens aperture to f/8 for optimal sharpness.
• Turn on highlight clipping indication in the camera. Set the shutter speed to the slowest speed that doesn't result in highlight clipping within the negative frame. Disregard any clipping indication in the sprocket holes of the negative.
• Feed the film through the holder and shoot a photo of each frame. Regularly blow off dust on the front and back of the film as you go.

Editing

This is the hardest part of the workflow.

Darktable

I use Darktable to edit the digital negatives.

Here's how my modules look for color negatives.

[SCREENSHOT OF MODULES]

Defaults

These are the default modules that I never changes.

White Balance

This neutralizes the light source color cast.

Inversion

This is the most important module in the whole workflow.

Contrast

Adjust the brights, midtones, and shadows.

Saturation

This workflow tends to mute the colors. Restore the colors with saturation.

Open your raw digital negative files in your raw image editor of choice. I use and quite like Darktable [LINK]. It's open source software closely modeled after Adobe Lightroom. I avoid using Adobe software because I don't want to pay for it and there are good alternatives. The other open source editing software people like is Raw Therapee [LINK]. I've used that, too. It has its strengths, but I've settled on Darktable. It's more flexible, and I get better results with it.

Note that I'm using Darktable 2.5.1 as of this writing. In the future Darktable and its modules may look different.

When I open my raw files in Darktable, the first thing I do is turn off some of the default modules and get it set up for my particular workflow. Here is the default setup:

[IMAGE OF DEFAULT MODULES]

I set the White Balance module to whatever the white balance of the camera was set to while shooting the film negative. For some reason using the "As Shot" setting doesn't retrieve the correct white balance setting from the image metadata, so instead I set a custom value of 5300. Didn't I say above that my light source is set to 5600? Yes, that's true, but when I set the white balance on my camera it measured the actual light temperature it was seeing at 5300. That's the value I used in the White Balance module.

[WHITE BALANCE SCREENSHOT]

Inversion

Darktable comes with the Negadoctor module to invert the digital negative into a positive image. From lots of trial, error, and learning I've come to see the inversion process in Negadoctor as the most critical part of the entire workflow. It's what determines the base color profile, contrast, and exposure level of the photos.

My current process of using Negadoctor is pretty fussy, but the results are better than any other workflow I've used up to now.

• Film Properties
  • D min - Sample a strip of the film base.
  • D max - Set this automatically.
  • Scanner bias - Set this automatically.
• Corrections
  • Shadow correction - Sample neutral shadow area for color cast correction.
  • Highlight correction - Sample neutral highlight area for color cast correction.
• Print Properties
  • I leave these setting alone. Instead, I handle contrast adjustment in later modules.

Complications

Sounds simple, right? It's more complicated than it looks. Here's what can go wrong.

• D min - There will be slight variance in how Negadoctor calculates the color components of the film base across the roll of film. This will result in slightly different color profiles across all the photos.
• D max - Setting this automatically by selecting a highlight region in the photo is a crap shoot. There can be dust or outlying specular highlights that throw off the measurement. One photo might have a D max of 1.25 dB, the next might be 3.22 dB, and the next might be maxed out at 6.0 dB.
• Color corrections
  • It can be hard to tell which shadows and highlights in the photo were actually neutral in the scene you photographed. Let's say you select a white wall to correct any color cast in the highlights. If that wall was actually cream in real life then Negadoctor will end up shifting all highlights in the blue direction. That will have a significant impact on the color profile of the photo.
  • The lighting conditions of the scene you photographed might not have been neutral. For example, if you shot during the golden hour when the light outside has more yellow and red, the highlights will naturally have a golden cast. The color correction tools of Negadoctor are designed to neutralize any color cast. Similarly with the cream-colored wall mentioned above, Negadoctor will end up shifting the highlights in the blue direction to counteract the warm tones of the golden hour.
  • Some photos don't have any obvious neutral colors in them. Let's say you take a photo of a thick green bush. You can't tell if any parts of the photo had neutral shadows or highlights, so there's no way to use the corrections tools to automatically correct color casts.
  • If you apply the color corrections to each photo individually on the roll, you'll get a lot of variability in the color profiles. The photos may look wildly different. Even two photos that you photographed seconds apart in the same scene will probably look different from each other. That's how sensitive Negadoctor can be to sampling variability.

Solution

The best way I've found to mitigate these issues is to create a Negadoctor preset for the whole roll and apply that preset to all the photos on the roll. This will result in a similar color profile across all photos. They will look much more like they've come from the same roll of film, and those two photos from the same scene will match better.

Here's how I create the Negadoctor preset. This is where the workflow gets tedious, so bear with me.

• Invert one photo with Negadoctor by following the steps above.
• Save the Negadoctor module as a preset.
• Apply that present to all the rest of the photos on the roll.
• Look through all the photos for one to use as a reference photo for the entire roll.
  • The ideal reference photo has 1) a neutral shadow area that is black or dark grey, 2) a neutral highlight area that is white, and 3) neutral lighting conditions.
  • Neutral lighting conditions could be light that contains the full spectrum of colors. Examples would be the light from a flash, the light from an overcast day, the light in the shadows on a sunny day.
• For the reference photo, clear the Negadoctor preset you had applied to it and set the Negadoctor settings up for that specific photo.
  • Be extra careful when sampling the shadow and highlight areas in the Corrections tab. Try a bunch of different samples in different parts of the photo until it looks right to you.
• Save this as the new base Negadoctor profile for the roll.
• Apply this profile to all the photos.

All of the photos have now been consistently inverted from negative to positive. Don't be worried if some of the photos are too dark, bright, warm, or cool. You'll fix those issues in later steps.

Exposure

Set the exposure for the midtones with Exposure module. This is where it gets very complicated with the inversion profile. You have to create a new Negadoctor preset for each exposure adjustment.

Contrast

Adjust contrast levels with three tools.

• Local Contrast
  • Always have this one. Increases perceived sharpness. Brings out more contrast between smaller regions.
• Color Balance RGB
  • Add brilliance to highlights to shift the historgram toward the right edge. Adds punch and pop to the photo while leaving the shadows and midtones rich.
• Filmic RGB
  • I set the white point to just when the shadows start moving to the left.
  • Set the black point all the way to the left.
  • Darken the shadows to add overall contrast but don't crush the blacks too much. That preserves more nuance in the shadows.

Color

The last step is to make any color adjustments.

• Chrominance - I almost always add some chrominance to the photos. I find that the inversion process produces photos that are slightly flat, so boost the color with Global Chrominance in the Color Balance RGB module.
• Color cast - The majority of the photos on the roll will have reasonable color profiles from the base Negadoctor preset. However, some of the photos may still have strong color casts. This is usually because the lighting conditions of those scenes were either especially warm or cool.
  • For example, the reference Negadoctor preset may be adding slight warmth to the highlights. This will work for many photos. If one of the photos was shot in the golden hour, though, adding slightly more warmth may make it look too unnatural on top of the golden warmth that's already there.
  • My way of addressing this is by going back to the White Balance module and adjusting the Temperature setting. If the photo is too warm I can increase the Temperature from 5300 to 6000. This will cool down the photo and counterbalance the excessive warmth. The resulting photo will still look golden and warm, but it will look more natural now.
  • Another scenario would be under artificial lighting. Again, this may look extremely warm due to the lack of blue light in most indoor lighting.
  • Another scenario is shooting photos in shadows during the golden hour. These photos will actually look too cool. This is because the nature of sunlight as it is setting is to