anyone here scans negative with AE turned off ?

[raytoei@gmail.com]

After scanning like 380 rolls of film, today i discovered that I could turn off the Autoexposure option in my Epson v600 scanner software.

Does anyone here scan with the AE turned off ?

The reason I did it was to compare scans at different ISO without the software fitting a Histogram AE out of the negatives.

While the images are flat, there is enough rich details for me to Photoshop the contrasts.

raytoei

 

[aad]

If you scan with AE off, then hit auto-levels, you are wasting time. I've done it, and foud my results looked about the same by the time I was done.

 

[andredossantos]

I turn AE off. I find I can get better results setting the exposure myself in PS/Lightroom/whatever. I find this especially true with high contrast negatives.

 

[raytoei@gmail.com]

the reason i currently turn the ae off is the make comparisons of the iso / development times easier. i am currently testing juan's method of testing development times with different iso speeds.

any other suggestions on capturing a rich negative ? I have read about adjusting the histogram to capturing a broader tones. As well as capturing in 16bit.

cheers!

raytoei

 

[craygc]

Using the Nikon scanners I always turn AE off for negatives. For every film type I profile a blank piece of the base (Vuescan) and save that as a profile. Basically, it locks exposure such that the black point is fundamentally set.

Setting black and white points stretches the histogram and, from tests I ran a long time ago, I found that the more stretching was applied to the black end, the more likely is was to exhibit speckling (but not always). Locking the black point in the scan exposure forces most of the stretching onto the white end of the histogram.

 

[craygc]

Steve,

I don't know about Nikonscan as I haven't used it for years. However, my suspicion is that it doesn't have the capability to lock the film base exposure like Vuescan does. Hopefully someone else will chime in and clarify this...

Craig--

This makes a lot of sense given actually it is the neg being scanned and not the image on the neg. I guess the silver print analogy is when blacks appear faded from over dodging.

Do you know if this is doable in Nikon Scan 4?

--Steve