Slide Scanning. Where am I going wrong?

[wlaidlaw]

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There comes a time when you you think "s#d this, lifes too short - just scan the bl**dy things in".

This is what I've done so far just scanning TIFF and white balancing in Vuescan then messing around with levels and colour balance in Capture NX2. If I scan RAW TIFF the histogram is well over to the left and opening with ColorPerfect doesn't seem to give me very nice colours compared to my feeble frustrating efforts with my laborious method.

Comments welcome.

Pete

 

Seriously Pete - try the software that came bundled with your V700. It works surprisingly well. Not the photo-manipulation rubbish that they give you but just the basic slide scanning program. It is not very good for colour negatives but I thought it worked pretty well for slide scanning. It was free - you have nothing to lose! I seemed to recall there was a free update on Epson's website. I think it is called E-Scan Assist but I am not in the UK at the moment where the V700 and its software are.

 

 

Wilson

[Stealth3kpl]

VueScan must be very complicated compared to the software for my Minolta Scan Elite 5400. I found it relatively easy to create a profile for Fuji Sensia and Kodachrome 64 and I can apply one of these to any scan of a Fuji or Kodak slide.

 

I've tweaked one of your photos in Lightroom do you think that it shows any improvement?

 

That looks great Howard. I think to profile a film with Vuescan and the V700 I need to get hold of an IT8 target and it's IT8 description file, profile the scanner then take a photo of the target and scan that negative/slide to profile the film(?)

Pete

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I would have thought that the fact that only slight adjustments in Lightroom are all that's required to show an improvement in the quality of the photo and a JPEG at that must indicate that your current settings are close to what is required.

 

Is Vue Scan not capable of creating a film profile without the need for any other input? I've done a Google search on IT8 as I've never heard of it before and it seems to be about calibrating devices such as monitors and printers. Unless you are trying to produce professional quality prints does this matter? Neither my monitor or cheap printer are calibrated to produce the same colour output as my scanner and yet the A4 prints I can produce are acceptable to me and as for the colour quality of my scans posted on the forum you can judge for yourself.

[wlaidlaw]

With my Polaroid Artixscan 4000 were included a number of slides made by Kodak, Afga and Fuji of targets in various of their films. I think they are what people mean by IT8 targets. However I was told by a professional that they fade, even if kept in ideal conditions, so it is essential to replace them every 3 to 4 years. As the targets I got with the Artixscan would have been at least 4 years old when I got them, I only ever used the Kodachrome one. They would now be about 9 years old and I imagine useless. In the UK you can get them from people like Silverfast and Colour Confidence but cheap they are not. They look like the image below.

 

Wilson

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Edited September 5, 2010 by wlaidlaw

[Stealth3kpl]

Seriously Pete - try the software that came bundled with your V700. It works surprisingly well.

Wilson

 

Having a look at it now but I must admit my heart's not in it at the moment.

Thanks for tthe heads up.

Pete

[Stealth3kpl]

Seriously Pete - try the software that came bundled with your V700. It works surprisingly well. Not the photo-manipulation rubbish that they give you but just the basic slide scanning program. It is not very good for colour negatives but I thought it worked pretty well for slide scanning.

Wilson

 

From what I could see the results weren't too bad. I seem to be having some glitches with mine that were frustrating me (kept saying the scanner wasn't plugged in and wouldn't put out the selected tiff size)

It might well be worth revisiting if only for quick batch scans. Thanks again.

 

I don't understand why this is happening to you Pete.

 

If you set it exactly as you do with negative film - ie to push out a raw tiff, 2x downsampling, multi pass, no colour balance etc... then just scan and open in colorpos. Then do the gamma adjustment and bingo that's it - easier than negative film.

 

I've just had another look at ColorPos and actually the results are ok and much quicker than what I was doing before. I think a lot of my slides are under exposed as I was trying a new hand held meter ahich seems to give under exposures of about 1 stop copared to the MP (and sometimes I think I hadn't noticed the light change). With well exposed slides the ColorPerfect result is pretty good but terrible if the light is iffy.

 

I'm quite keen to get hold of one of these IT8 cards to profile the scanner and film. Is it worth doing it for colour negative or is the C41 process too variable to make it any use?

Pete

[wlaidlaw]

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Pete,

 

I too kept getting the scanner not connect message when I had the V700 connected with USB. I am now using a Firewire 400 to 800 lead on my old PowerMac and that solved that particular issue.

 

Wilson

[Julian Thompson]

I'm quite keen to get hold of one of these IT8 cards to profile the scanner and film. Is it worth doing it for colour negative or is the C41 process too variable to make it any use?

Pete

 

Aha!

 

I thought you'd done that already. I found that to be pretty important Pete - first step.

[Julian Thompson]

Sorry - to be clear - I don't profile the film, but I did profile my scanner and also my screen (I bought an X rite Eye One for this - works great).

[wlaidlaw]

To echo Julian's point, I tried to profile the V700 scanner using a 48 patch Gretag McBeth card direct on the bed - not good! I really do think that you need an IT8 target to get spot on. As I said above, I am not in the UK at the moment where my V700 is but I seem to remember that somewhere in the huge bundle of junk that came with the scanner, there was some sort of profiling target - worth checking. Of course you could go the long way round and take a slide of a G-M colour card and then profile from that, as the patches have known values.

 

Wilson

[BennehBoy]

I've never used IT8 targets - it's a waste of time on a prosumer scanner imho.

 

I think the key thing to realise is that you will never get perfect colour straight out of the scanner - it's just not going to happen. The key is to ensure you are not spending hours on each scan correcting it afterward. I expect that I spend a minute at most getting colour corrected to a level I deem acceptable, and the important part in this statement is the word 'acceptable'.

 

Naturally you would vary the effort spent depending on the audience for the output, an exhibition print you can be damned sure will be as near perfect, and perhaps more importantly, as consistent with it's image peer group as I can make it.

 

I'll attempt to write up a blog article covering using colourperfect on negs & slide some time in the next few days, the vuescan only article that I wrote is a bit long in the tooth now - and way too time intensive.

 

It may be of use, it may not, but the thing to take away is it's all about what is acceptable.

[Stealth3kpl]

I think the key thing ...................getting colour corrected to a level I deem acceptable, and the important part in this statement is the word 'acceptable'..

 

 

 

I'll attempt to write up a blog article covering using colourperfect on negs & slide some time in the next few days, .

 

Looking forward to it.

Pete

[Stealth3kpl]

Sorry - to be clear - I don't profile the film, but I did profile my scanner and also my screen (I bought an X rite Eye One for this - works great).

 

Yes, I thought you'd said you had. Where did you get your target?

Pete

[Julian Thompson]

Came from the same dealer that sold me the X rite Eye One (can't remember the name) - but as Wilson said the V750 actually came with a target in the box. The only problem with that target was that the software didn't seem to match the target so well so the Wolf Faust (spelling?) one I bought later worked much better.

 

In contrast to Benneh I did find that creating a new ICC profile and calibrating my monitor made a very great difference to the quality of my scans in respect of colour. I do not know why this is the case.

[wlaidlaw]

If I remember right, the V700 comes with a 5x4 IT8 target but this is only designed to be used with the Silverfast Software. It may be me but I have never been able to get on with Silverfast, ever since I used to be given free copies when I was a Contax Beta tester back in the early noughties.

 

Wilson

[Stealth3kpl]

I think my film was quite under exposed. Another film from another day was better exposed so I've been scanning to RAW TIFF and opening with ColorPerfect and getting better results but I still get a magenta cast to the clouds (probably throughout the image). I'm not sure if this is old film related or what.

This one's not too bad though.

 

Pete

 

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[BennehBoy]

In contrast to Benneh I did find that creating a new ICC profile and calibrating my monitor made a very great difference to the quality of my scans in respect of colour. I do not know why this is the case.

 

Profiling your monitor is an essential step imho, the scanner not so much (might make colours closer but will never remove the need to fine tune), typically adjustments made in PS on a calibrated monitor should pretty much be good enough (don't forget to soft proof for the target colour space!).

 

Naturally it all comes down to what's acceptable and cost versus effort etc.

[Stealth3kpl]

Can you go through colour balancing when you update your blog? I'm particularly interested in how to get white whites as you do in you summit shots on scafell (?).

This blog for colour neg scanning looks very good except for the very last step where he says you can "go wild" and suddenly there's a perfectly colour balanced image with no explanation of how he got there. Please try to avoid this!!

 

I found this this morning. The mouse-over images are interesting

IT8 Target Review

 

Pete

Edited September 8, 2010 by Stealth3kpl

[BennehBoy]

Happy to do that.

 

In short it's pretty straighforward, I add a 'selective color' adjustment layer in photoshop, then usually select 'neutral tones' and simply slide the CMY adjusters to remove whichever colour cast is prevalent. The idea is to do this with the smallest adjustments as possible - large adjustments will inevitably lead to some gamut clipping somewhere.

 

For the photo you first posted I'd try this first on the neutrals, dropping a couple of points of meagenta off by sliding the magenta slider to the left, and if the sky still looked magenta afterward I'd try a similar adjustment on the blues.

 

It's all pretty much suck it and see approach, but you become much more skilled at it the more you do it.

 

Another key thing to observe when doing this is to take regular breaks from the screen otherwise your brain can become 'used to' a caste and you won't recognise that it's there.

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[BennehBoy]

FWIW magenta casts are the usual problem for me too, I'm not sure if this is the v700/vuescan combo or the fact that I predominantly shoot fuji film (I don't recall having this problem with kodak films).