Reproducible with VueScan scan?

wp-foto · 2016-03-26T15:54:17+00:00

Bin noch recht neu in der analogen Fotografie. Habe mir eine ZenzaBronica ETRSi zugelegt und die ersten 3 SW Filme sind auch belichtet und entwickelt. Nun...

wp-foto

I’m still quite new to analogue photography. I’ve bought a ZenzaBronica ETRSi and have already had the exposure and development done on my first three rolls of black-and-white film. Now I’ve got my first colour negatives back from a local lab. I wanted to scan these using VueScan and an Epson V550. Unfortunately, every image looks different as soon as you load a new frame for scanning. The white balance is different every time, even though the photos were taken from the same series using the same settings. ? With Epson Scan, I can simply save my settings. And hey presto, they work for the next image or the next roll of film too. ? Am I just unable to find the settings for saving exposure and white balance in VueScan? I’ve attached some sample images below. ? ?

Urnes

I’d suggest you save the settings globally using the ‘Save As’ dialogue box. You don’t need to set up the frame from scratch every time, though; you can simply move it. If you want a professional result, get yourself an IT 8 target for your chosen film http://www.targets.coloraid.de/ and calibrate using that. Regards, Sven.

grommi

Here is my tried-and-tested method, honed over years of practice, for quick and extremely simple scans using Vuescan, which require no RAW faff and – if any at all – only minimal post-processing. € 1. Disable all automatic settings wherever possible. Clean negatives don’t need IR dust and scratch removal; with my very clean, home-developed negatives (B&W and colour), this can be done later with just a few clicks if necessary. Saves an enormous amount of time when scanning. Deselect everything in the filter tab! I achieve these clean negatives by wiping them with kitchen paper folded into a V-shape after the final rinse with tap water and a drop of washing-up liquid. I can already hear the outcry from the lab community, but since I’ve been doing it this way, I’ve had the cleanest and most scratch-free negatives I’ve ever had. With the possible exception of Efke films (may the almighty lab god have mercy on their souls) with their wipe-off emulsions, for which I shed no tears. The Mirko does this much better today with its CHS 100 II. And after hanging them up in the bathroom for half an hour, the negatives are dry and ready for further processing. Hardly any commercial lab delivers negatives this clean, perhaps with the exception of the very expensive ones. I know professional photographers who have been processing their films this way for decades and have no issues with long-term stability either. I can only strongly recommend processing your own film. € € 2. I don’t use film profiles or carriers and always scan ‘generically’. White balance: almost always ‘Auto Extreme’. Only for badly cross-processed or long-expired film do I sometimes use manual settings. VueScan calculates the orange mask very reliably, and thanks to the ‘Extreme’ setting, every bit of information ends up in the scan. That takes care of most of it. Tip: select the various graphs under the "Image" menu option – very helpful and informative. € 3. If necessary, I set the black and white points here in the scanning programme, as well as making an initial adjustment to the (somewhat unfamiliar) gradation curve. Save as a JPG with 100% quality. I no longer need RAW files for the remaining minor corrections in the editing programme. € 4. Now for the nitty-gritty: if I need absolutely uniform scans of images taken under exactly the same conditions, here’s how to do it: set the preview and selection frame. Under “Source”, tick the box for “Keep exposure”. New preview, do not change the frame. Tick the boxes for “Maintain film base colour” and “Maintain colour balance”. Done. Now Vuescan scans every negative using the same settings and producing the same results every time. You can also save these settings under “File -> Save Settings”. However, as soon as something changes with the negative material, you may get similar but certainly sub-optimal results. This method is only useful for absolutely identical negatives. As soon as the sun shines a little more or less, or the model has changed their clothes, everything can be completely different. Then manual adjustment is required again. Film profiles cannot be created this way; in my opinion, they are all completely useless anyway. With professional scanners and the appropriate software, this may be different. But then we’re talking about hardware that used to cost well into five figures. € Good light – Reinhold € € PS @ wp-photo: you take really lovely portraits. The minor differences could probably be easily evened out during subsequent image processing.

TR

Hi, I agree with Reinhold on these points. From my own experience, I know that even negatives taken under identical conditions can differ (slides, on the other hand, do not). My current workflow involves placing them side by side on a large monitor and using Photoshop’s ‘LAB mode’ to filter them out. I scan the negatives ‘raw’, i.e. without any colour corrections in the scanning software and certainly no automatic settings. Good photographic work always requires a certain amount of effort, especially series – whether in the darkroom or on the computer. If you are the lucky owner of Photoshop, you always have the option later on to change the colour adjustments of any image file again (‘Adjustment Layers’). You can’t do that with ‘Vuescan’ or similar software.

grommi

To demonstrate what the results of a series look like using my simple method, you can take a look at this album: € https://www.flickr.com/photos/imagesfrugales/sets/72157658170880590 € I didn’t spend much time fiddling around with them; using the ‘Automatic Extreme Values’ method, they more or less came straight out of the scanner like that. Post-processing time per image: 0–1 minute.

Franco

Hello, I’m going to give this a go – I think it’s a well-written guide to Vuescan. http://www.photoinfos.com/Fotosoftware/Vuescan/vuescan-schwarzweissfilme.htm The method described above, which involves setting the exposure and colour masking, works well, but I now use the ‘right-click on the image’ option to set the manual alignment to identical positions. It’s quicker that way. Best regards, Thorsten