Originally posted by LesDMess color/contrast of any digital media - including scanned film, can be adjusted in post and only limited by your imagination.
Within limits...
My experience with scanned film is that the latitude for modification is a little
worse than with a digital capture JPEG and nowhere near what can be accomplished with a RAW capture*. This is even true with 16-bit TIFF output. For many films, scans are just simply "
brittle" in PP where the usual approaches result in nasty artifact or amplification of grain and/or color cast. This is particularly true when attempting to increase contrast, sharpness, or color saturation. I figure it has something to do with the low-level heterogeneity of the scan and of the negative itself.
Having said that, I will step back one and qualify by saying that much depends on the film. Careful scan technique can help as well with difficult negatives. I am a fan of Ferrania Solaris 100/400 films. Their color rendition is a little exotic to start with and the negatives have distinct grain, but for some reason Ferrania takes very well to color and curve manipulation in post and the shoulder is very robust. I have more fun with the stuff. With Ektar, I generally get close to what I want on the base scan without the need to adjust much and can work the curves, but within limits. If underexposed, Ektar is very difficult to work with if shadow detail is required. If I need to pull the shadows up, a new scan is usually in order. If the magenta color cast is present, good luck on getting rid of it. Kodachrome slides...hmmmm...if they don't scan up well, there is very little you can do with them in PP and yes, both my scanners have tuned modes for K-64.
Steve
* I have never tried VueScan's RAW scan, nor the Coolscan's version of NEF.