Scanning my way to insanity

sanmich

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Nov 3, 2006
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Hi all

Please help!
I am trying to scan black and white negatives for a blurb book, and it's driving me totally nuts.
I am trying to achieve a level of quality such that I would consider these scans as "digital negatives".
I am using a coolscan 5000 run with vuescan.
First furstration, and I'm just venting here since I don't think there is a way around: who is the genius at Nikon that decided that I have to choose between the details on the right side of my negs and those on the left side?
why impose a cropping?? :bang::bang:

Now for the things I'm really trying to understand:
I have done all the scanning with a scanhancer, saving the RAW files as DNG. when I came to develop them under LR, some where way too flat to be usable. It seems that the scanhancer is messing the scanner automatic light measure (I didn't know there was such an adjustment).
When I don't use the scanhancer, the auto exposure seems ok, the histogram looks fine BUT I see more defects, some of them will be hard to work on like long thin scratches.

If I use the scanhancer, I need to lock exposure manually to get a decent histogram (and even then I see a small compression in the highlights, but I don't think it's a problem).
Locking the exposure takes time, and for some reason, scanning the frame is MUCH longer. (why??)
Since I am scanning the same type of film (all TX), I was thinking I could lock the exposure for the whole process to shorten the process, but I am afraid small differences in density would screw the results.

What is your experience with these issues?

Thanks!
 
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