Epson v700 scanning workflow ?

[Havoc]

I've just bought an Epson v700 and would really appreciate any advice on how to get the best results from my Fuji GW690III & Pentax 67 (when it arrives) negs and slides ? Which software is best ? Epson's own or the bundled Silverfast ? What settings should I use ?

cheers,
John.

 

[Moriturii]

I have a EPson 4990 and I have tried Silverfast and Vuescan, maybe I just suck but I hate both softwares. So extremely difficult and complicated to use, not newbie friendly at all.

I love Epsons software scanner, it's perfect for me. You pop the film in, preview, untick all the boxes (like sharpening), go into histogram, slide the white and plack point arrows under the histogram to far left and right of the histogram, and underneath you will see a slide where you set how light or dark your hightlights or shadows will be (it's called "Output"). This is at 10 (out of 0-225) for dark bit, set it to 0 and the light portion is at 200 (again, out of 255) set it to max (255). Now you get full dynamic range.

No sharpening no nothing applied, scan it as .tif, and do rest of the work in photoshop.

That's what I do 🙂

PS: Forgot to mention. I only take B&W pictures and thus only scan them. Never tried color.

 

[Pete B]

You'll get a great variation of answers to this. I've tried Vuescan and Silverfast and really wanted to like them. For a long time people were telling me to try the Epson software. I'm sold on it at present because it allows me to batch scan. I scan colour neg as a positive with no colour correction or sharpening. I then have a "negative" TIFF that I convert to a positive in my PP software. This way I have the convenience of batch scanning and files that have no data lost. I have yet to be convinced of a better method than this for me. I've spent months asking on all the forums I know for someone to show me a better method than mine and, although some have chirped up saying I'm doing it wrong, they haven't come up with the goods to prove it. Rant over. Save yourself a lot of time by batch scanning with EpsonScan then invert correctly (i.e. not using "Invert") in photoshop or whatever, then learn to colour balance as best you can.
Pete
If you'd like more information PM me (I'm working today).

 

[thegman]

I like Vuescan, but for me, the BetterScanning holders really transformed the scanner. With the anti-newton glass, it's so easy to get the film flat, and they're quicker to use. The results are very noticeably better too.

I think with some effort, you can get results similar to dedicated film scanners.

 

[f16sunshine]

Epson scan for B+W negs so far. I've used it for trans and color negs but not with 100% satisfaction yet. I must admit that more trials should result in better results. For B+W negs. I'm very happy with the v700 and epsonscan. Make the flattest neg (low contrast) with detail as you can. Do all other contrast adjustments in PP. The better scanning holders are an improvement for 120. I don't use the ANR glass yet but may try in the future. A badly curled negative will need to be flattened with books and maybe a bit of heat. Our member Keith described a method to flatten negs using an Iron. I tried it placing a negative under 15mm of book pages and then ironing to apply heat. Definitely did the job. Also I would suggest to try scanning at the very first moment the negatives are dry enough to handle (assuming the dried flat). The extra moisture and "Fatness" in the negative seems to give a scan with better gradation. It's subtle but I notice it for sure. The V700 is a capable machine. Much better suited for 120/220 and sheet film than 35mm but, perfectly usable for all.
Cheers

 

[imokruok]

I really only scan 120/220 on my V700. I use the betterscanning.com 120 holder with ANR glass inserts. For software, Epson Scan does just as nice of a job for me as Vuescan or otherwise. I also purchased a sheet of extra ANR glass so that I can just put negatives right on the glass and scan film frame edges.

All that said, the newton rings are about the most maddening thing about scanning. The glass does not solve the problem at all. The best thing to do is flatten the negatives as best possible, and scan without any glass. I've done entire rolls only to notice little rings on every negative after the fact.

 

[Sjixxxy]

All that said, the newton rings are about the most maddening thing about scanning. The glass does not solve the problem at all.

Strange, I've never gotten rings since I started using the insert about two years ago.

 

[shambla]

I use Silverfast with my V700, but like a lot of people I tried both Vuescan and Silverfast when I first bought the scanner a couple of years back, found the interface for both to be pretty horrible and just stuck with the Epson software. As people already said, with Epson Scan you get good batch scanning options and the results aren't bad as long as you turn off all of the auto settings and use the histogram/levels/curves settings to avoid clipping any highlights/shadows at the scanning stage.

Anyway, about a year or so later I thought I'd give Silverfast another go - I still found the interface horrible to begin with, but I persevered and rescanned some slides and negs I had previously scanned using Epson Scan. In terms of sharpness and contrast the two are much the same, but Silverfast produces noticeably better colour balance, particularly with colour negatives when using the correct film profiles in negafix. To some extent you can improve the colours of the Epson Scan output in whatever image editor you use for post processing, but particularly for C41 film I can never get such pleasing results as when using the appropriate negafix profile in Silverfast as a starting point.

I normally scan at 3200dpi to a tiff file, open that in Photoshop and then save it again as a tiff file, but with LZW compression, which dramatically reduces the file size. If it's a photo I really care about, especially if it was shot on a tripod, then I'll scan at 6400dpi and then downsample to 3200dpi in Photoshop afterwards. This does give a slight boost in sharpness compared to scanning at 3200 initially - nothing major, but it doesn't cost anything. The resulting files are quite large (approx 60MB), but storage is so cheap these days that assuming you have a sufficiently fast computer to cope with editing files of this size, I don't really think it is much of an issue.

I also use the betterscanning.com 120 holders with the ANR glass inserts. I did some comparisons against the standard holders to see what kind of improvements are available. For my particular V700, I found the sharpest results for both were with the holders set to minimum height, though within reason changes in height didn't have a huge impact. Perhaps because I am scanning relatively flat negs to begin with, I didn't notice a massive difference in sharpness between the two holders, however the betterscanning holder did get rid of a small amount of distortion present in the scans from the Epson holder, by eliminating the small amount of curl still left in the negs.

The betterscanning holder + ANR glass is also faster to work with than the Epson holder - just drop in the film strip, put the glass on and scan. No fiddling to get the piece of film as flat as possible before scanning.