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V700, Vuescan Colour Management


Stealth3kpl

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C41 film, when exposed correctly and processed properly, will always give you highlights that are under control and shadows that are detailed. It has a dynamic range way beyond E6 slide film and has a beautiful, slow tail in the highlight end of the histogram when compared to digital shots, which might as well have an on/off switch when it comes to blown highlights. No digital capture can compete to a properly exposed and processed C41 negative, scanned by someone who knows how to scan, with a suitable scanner.

 

If you can get it right (and it's worth persevering) there is nothing in the colour world that will touch C41 negative film for the complete picture.

 

But, it's a pig to scan, in my experience. E6 is much easier, as you have a positive original with which to compare the scan, as opposed to a negative piece of film, or (probably) a cheap lab print, done on a Noritsu scanner/printer.

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OK This is what I do - first, my settings (note film base colour is locked for this particular film - you don't just copy these settings you lock the film base colour by measuring a part of the film that has at least 5% unexposed area on it to get the right values in there, as per the Vuescan manual.)

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Then I scan in and open in photoshop or elements and crop down around the edges of the scan neatly.

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Then I open colorperfect and play with the gamma to get it just as I want it.

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Then I bring that into Aperture, and that becomes the accurate 'master' - as in, that's basically what I shot - unsharpened and with no adjustment. Like this.

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At this point I want (cruddy screenshots permitting) to say that in my opinion the difference between this and using like EpsonScan or whatever (as you did with that software you used initially that made the postbox jump off the screen!) is that they apply a lot of 'impact' in their settings right out of the box. My image of Clapton here is, well, pretty flat and boring but it has accurate colours. That's good - now I am in charge of where it goes from here. Will I just bring in the black point and leave it at that? Or will I boost the saturation a bit and make a small white balance change? Some sharpening? All my choice - and that is (in my opinion) what makes using the Vuescan/Colourperfect combo so versatile.

 

Quickly then I added some saturation and sharpened it up as well as a bit of contrast to darken it a touch.

 

I hope this helps you Pete - or anyone else interested in going down this route for film scanning. I enjoy doing it and I've learnt a lot along the way (and continue to do so!) but mainly I am now happy with my scans so I guess that means I've got there!

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Thanks for that Julian, that's a great help. Coincidently I'd been writing something out for a new thread that summarizes what I've read over the last few days on my steep learning curve. I'll digest what you've written then reference your thoughts here. There seems to be precious little info on the web about colour neg scanning for those starting out.

Earlier you mentioned having Gamma C on 1.5 rather than 1.8 or 2.2 but I noticed in your screen shot it's on 2.2. Why is this?

Also, when you say you adjust Gamma (not Gamma C) to your liking, do you mean you leave black and white at their defaults and adjust the value of Gamma alone?

Pete

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Ah yes sorry Pete well noticed. I do leave white and black points alone generally, as I'm aiming for a fast workflow that lets me do 24 shots really quickly and gets me to the Aperture stage where I can tweak the black point. Of course there is nothing wrong with touching them in CP.

 

When I said Gamma I really meant Gamma C of course, yes.

 

I do begin at 1.5 always for gamma, and only altered it up on this one because it looked slightly better like that as it is a darker image to start with and I wanted to make sure I was getting all the detail in there into Aperture. On brighter images like the one of the black and white signpost that you posted up 1.5 would be great - 2.2 would probably blow the sky and then you'd be into using the highlight clipping control which can sometimes make it look a bit 'artificial'.

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I suspect some people may wonder if it is really worthwhile investing time and money in home scanning. I've suspected that the pro lab I've been sending my films to have been overexposing some shots of mine that I've deliberately under exposed. This introduces noise and affects the colour. Take this example. My scan is just as I remember it. I took the shot thinking I'd crop out the periphery to catch the evening light on the distant clifts which I exposed for. The Pro Lab has greatly over exposed the image attempting to bring up the lake shore which was not of interest.

Pete

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Here's another example. Home scanning allows much more information to be held compared to the Pro Scan. That 's more information for me to destroy with my poor photoshop skills:D

Pete

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Slightly better white bal and a little more contrast I think.

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Pete - the second ones are really good but I'm not so convinced about the trees etc being so heavily blacked out in the first one?

 

Maybe come in with a level tweak instead if you want to pull the sky in? Like this?

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