EpsonScan & Provia 400x: Going together like water and electricity

[kiss-o-matic]

Got a handful of rolls of E6 developed over the weekend. I shot a roll of my son at the beach w/ E100VS, some street shots w/ Provia 400x, and a bunch of drag queens in E100G (medium format). Looking at the negs, I'm really, really happy with what came out. On my computer, not so much.

E100VS: I've not gone through them closely but from the previews, the colors looked fine. The usual warmth the film boasts.
E100G: Not gotten to these yet (b/c of time spent below).
Provia 400X: EpsonScan (on two different computers) is just not liking this film. Both rolls were shot on a very sunny day (F16 using Sunny 16 for the most part). On the negs the colors are great. When I scan them (same settings as E100VS which are more or less defaults) they come out with a crazy red shift. Like... 3 warming filters. The fix is to use image adjustment and go to color balance. Cyan <-> Red at -35 and Yellow <-> Blue at 20 seems to get it close to what my amateur eyes see on the neg. That's pretty drastic.

I know getting an IC8 target is apparently the way to go on these, but I always though that was to from acceptable to 'highly accurate' scans. These aren't really acceptable without me doing tweaks. Woe is me. Is this par for the course?

 

[kiss-o-matic]

The big kick in the package is that Epson Scan requires me to make all those changes one by one. Annoying... and really poor programming. This is coming from a programmer.

 

[Sarcophilus Harrisii]

Got a handful of rolls of E6 developed over the weekend. I shot a roll of my son at the beach w/ E100VS, some street shots w/ Provia 400x, and a bunch of drag queens in E100G (medium format). Looking at the negs, I'm really, really happy with what came out. On my computer, not so much.

E100VS: I've not gone through them closely but from the previews, the colors looked fine. The usual warmth the film boasts.
E100G: Not gotten to these yet (b/c of time spent below).
Provia 400X: EpsonScan (on two different computers) is just not liking this film. Both rolls were shot on a very sunny day (F16 using Sunny 16 for the most part). On the negs the colors are great. When I scan them (same settings as E100VS which are more or less defaults) they come out with a crazy red shift. Like... 3 warming filters. The fix is to use image adjustment and go to color balance. Cyan <-> Red at -35 and Yellow <-> Blue at 20 seems to get it close to what my amateur eyes see on the neg. That's pretty drastic.

I know getting an IC8 target is apparently the way to go on these, but I always though that was to from acceptable to 'highly accurate' scans. These aren't really acceptable without me doing tweaks. Woe is me. Is this par for the course?

Negs? Are you sure you got them done as E6? If you're seeing negs, that's not a software issue.

If you think Epson Scan is an ordinary piece of software, you should try Silverfast. And the quality of your scans is going to be proportional to the amount of effort you put into them. If you're expecting any scanner to fly through any type of film you feed it at its default settings (your words), your results will be mixed, at best.

FWIW my own workflow is essentially to adjust the histrogram for each colour channel to avoid clipping of highlights and shadows and if needed some minor adjustment to mid tones and outputs. This is not infallible, by any means, but it often goes a long way to eliminating any colour cast (well, any that is not a by product of the particular film involved, you are aware that using film means you're working with a pre-determined white balance, right?), and, if it doesn't, it's usually fairly manageable to edit out if desired. Kodak chromes and Fujichromes generally render scenes differently. If you're getting different results from Ektachrome and Provia 400X out of your scanner using the same settings for each this shouldn't be unexpected.

One of the big advantages of scanning positives, as opposed to negative films, is that you can make direct comparisons with the piece of film. I suggest re-scanning with reference to the film itself. If your scans are a reasonable facsimile of the original exposure (within the limitations of the analog to digital conversion process) and you are still unhappy with their appearance, you don't need a new scanner (or software for same): you need a new film.
Cheers,
Brett

 

[kiss-o-matic]

Sorry, bad choice of words. They are positive, definitely done in E6 at a very reputable lab.

I do have Silverfast... and found Vuescan to be much better. They all have their issues, but Silverfast gave me the most "varied" results... which was most likely a setting not being reflected properly in the controls. A programming bug (probably) -- still annoying though.

I'm only roughly comparing the film to the scan. W/ the Provia 400x it's just really obvious it has to worked over... not tweaked. The Kodak stuff just needs tweaking. Can we call this coincidence? I tried the Provia on both Vuescan & EpsonScan and the results were the same shift. Might try SilverFast for fun. I'm pretty sure I still have it installed.