Charlotte Makes Photos

After Thursday’s upsetting event, in my own little act of defiance (and because I had already loaded the camera), I went out after lunch to expose my final 220 roll of Agfa Optima.

I wasn’t too defiant: I decided to get myself out into the sun of my immediate neighbourhood instead of venturing further west.

There are some films that really highlight that there are many colour conversion steps between the film, the scanner, and my computer and this roll of Optima 400 is one of them. It also helped cement my irritation with the flatbed scanner I use for 120 film.

When I scanned the negatives in SilverFast 9, they looked really good, with lovely colours, nice balanced exposure, and a colour temperature that looked great. The saved file, on the other hand, took on a heavy green-cyan cast, which I am just not equipped to really compensate for very well.

More importantly, I shouldn’t have to. The Plustek 8200i I use for 35mm never really demands this from me and I can’t think of any reason why the colours would be consistently thrown so far off with the V600. I should note that this happens on macOS and it happened on Windows 11 in a VM on Debian.

I had originally wanted to replace both scanners with a Plustek 120, but at about $4,000 (CAD), it might just make sense to consider mirrorless camera scanning, which, for my purposes, I could set myself up with something suitable for about half the cost.

The best first step will be to actually spend the time to investigate the settings I am using on SilverFast for the V600 to determine whether I’m just saving the files with the wrong colour space or something like that. After such an expensive year, a free solution to the problem is always more welcome than one that comes with a price tag.