Captain Kidd
Well-known
Thanks Beemermark, I will do some tests with cropping to get a better understanding of how my Plustek behaves.
Captain Kidd
Well-known
Id love to hear from anyone who uses vuescan, and sees overall exposure change based on what is cropped.
Particular
a.k.a. CNNY, disassembler
This is not how I would recommend scanning with vuescan, especially with color negs. Once you white balance and set the white and black points, you are locking in those colors and limiting your adjustments later. Vuescan is good at controlling the scanner, but has somewhat limited tools for adjusting color, and you really can't draw any conclusions from the preview it gives. Photoshop or Lightroom have far more sophisticated color controls.
Color negative film has great latitude, so you can have frames on the same roll that vary wildly in exposure and still produce good images. The contrast within each image tends to be lower compared to either b+w or slides. The concern people used to have when scanning slides was that the contrast was too high and they would be clipping the blacks or highlights. With color negatives this is almost impossible to do. To get a good scan all you really need is to set the exposure (often default will do) to capture the entire dynamic range. Optionally you want to compensate for the orange mask. All else can be done better in other software.
I batch scan a lot of color negs, and output them as 48bit (3x 16bit)files with the raw setting. I save them either as raw tiff or dng and then I adjust them in Lightroom.
I start by scanning the leader and using it to 'lock exposure', and then I set the 'lock film base color' compensate for the orange mask (read that section of the manual to understand how to use this feature). I use Nikon scanners which have the analog gain controls which fairly efficiently neutralizes the colors. I'm not sure about the plustek, but I do the same with an epson scanner, and it also works ok. I then use these settings to scan the rest of the roll. I don't even do any previews once I have set the film spacing.
The only thing I let vuescan do is cropping, exposure, compensate the base color, light dust removal, and inversion (by setting it to color negatives). I set the color tab to 'None'.
Color negs always need a lot of adjustment to look right, but usually I can correct a typical frame and apply the settings to all the frames on the roll, and I'll have a good starting point for those images.
I hope this helps.
Captain Kidd
Well-known
Thats incredibly helpful, than you CNNY, I really appreciate you taking the time to give me your scanning procedure. Im going to do a bunch of test scans this weekend and see how things go, thanks alot.