[filmscanners] RE: Vuescan and Digicams

["Frank Paris" <frankparis@comcast.net>]

I use nothing but VueScan with my SS4000. Slides are duck soup with this
combination. Negatives are a little more problematical in my experience
but you can still get great results combined with Photoshop. Recently
I've been scanning several rolls of Kodak's new Portra 400UC and getting
jaw-dropping results. But often what I see in Vuescan is very puzzling.
VueScan thinks that most of my negatives are severely overexposed and I
have to set the brightness to as low as 0.4, rarely as high as 0.9. But
oddly the ones that seem to have the best contrast are those that
Vuescan thinks are the most overexposed, i.e. the ones I have to set the
brightness down to 0.4 through 0.6. The higher I have to set the
brightness to have the preview look "properly" exposed, the less
contrast there is in the preview image, in fact they look downright
ghastly. When they go into Photoshop the ones that VueScan thought were
the most overexposed require the least correction, and vice-versa. Some
of my negatives that I had to set around 0.5 brightness in VueScan came
into Photoshop looking absolutely stunning and I didn't have to do a
thing to them before archiving and printing, and the printed result was
awesome: very sharp with great tonal range and color accuracy. The ones
where I had to set the brightness close to 1 came into Photoshop with
extremely low contrast that superficially look like hopeless cases. But
this is only a minor problem for Photoshop. Running it through Auto
Levels and/or Auto Color gets it within the ball park and from there I
can make moderate use of curves to touch it up and I end up with images
that are just as stunning as the ones that come directly into Photoshop
almost ready-made.

Frank Paris
frankparis@comcast.net

> -----Original Message-----
> From: filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk] On Behalf Of Alex Z
> Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 12:41 PM
> To: frankparis@comcast.net
> Subject: [filmscanners] Re: Vuescan and Digicams
>
>
> All that much talkign about Vuescan, so I decided to give it
> a shoot again (tried it about a year a half ago with my IV ED
> - didn't wrok well, neither liked the interface so went back
> to NikonScan). I'm getting constant overexposure (about 1-2
> stops estimated). Vuescan instructions say something about
> the exposure calibration per film diffeernt for negs and
> slides (though usage of exp. lock), couldn';t figure out what
> exactly they meant, trying to proceed with it gave just
> horrible things. Can somebody to lthrow some light how to use
> Vuescan nevertheless ? I suspect the color balance for negs
> may be somewhat better then of NikonScan though the one by
> NikonScan isn't bad at all except of frequent reddish tint
> (easily to deal with in PS though).

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