[filmscanners] RE: SS4000 "blown out" yellows and no blue information; where is my problem?

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

Is this a new problem? How long have you had your SS4000 and how many
images have you scanned with it? Maybe your scanner is just getting old.
I've had mine for a couple years and have put about 10,000 slides and
negatives through it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's acting up on me
after all that. With VueScan, I get two different results: absolutely
outstanding that requires virtually no tweaking in Photoshop and pale
and excessively low contrast, and this from negative to negative which
to the naked eye all seem to have approximately the same density. I can
almost always recover a semblance of the "real" image that is there
through various radical techniques in Photoshop, so I can more or less
live with the variability, but the final tweaked image is never really
up to the quality I get from an outstanding scan. But I don't understand
how it could be VueScan that is doing this. Sometimes I can get the
outstanding image simply by rescanning. It's like my SS4000 is flaking
out on me intermittently.

I have been shooting with Kodak Portra 400 UC lately because I just love
the results when I get one of those outstanding scans, which is about
75% of the time. But the odd thing is, I have to set the Brightness on
average to 0.5 when I get the outstanding scans and about 0.9 when I get
the washed out scans. On Velvia and Provia 100F I average 1.0 on the
Brightness setting and I never get these weirdly washed out scans. I
don't know. Harware, software? I've always had "trouble" with negatives
and the SS4000, but have learned to live with it, especially since I get
such outstanding results 75% of the time with this Kodak UC film.

Frank Paris
frankparis@comcast.net

> -----Original Message-----
> From: filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk] On Behalf Of snsok@cox.net
> Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2003 9:47 PM
> To: frankparis@comcast.net
> Subject: [filmscanners] RE: SS4000 "blown out" yellows and no
> blue information; where is my problem?
>
>
> I made various scans with both VueScan 7.5 which I own and
> 7.6 demo. I also tried changing between neutral, autolevels
> and white balance for the Color Balance setting.
> Unfortunately you can't get to all the options on the demo.
> That part I could only do with Vuescan 7.5
>
> Vuescan actually produces a worse scan. The yellow flowers
> are flatter and the blue value is uniformly 0 throughout the flowers.
>
> Looking at the R, G and B channels, I just don't think
> there's enough information there to work with. The R channel
> is virtually white, the G nearly white and the B is black--as
> predicted by the info numbers. I tried some channel mixing on
> a luminosity-blended layer and couldn't bring out useable
> detail that way.
>
> Stan Schwartz

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