VueScan Help - Poor Exposure and Color Cast

[serious]

Hi, I'm not exactly a VueScan novice. I've read an e-version of the book and followed the various methods found online. However, after a couple of months I have yet to get a good result with VueScan. All my 35mm negative scans come with a blue-green color cast and exposure that looks washed out.

I get similar results when using Epson Scan with the setting "No Color Correction." I'm using VueScan on a Mac 10.6 with a V600 scanner.

I'm basically following the method, outlined in the book. I crop an empty frame and lock the exposure and lock the base color. Then I select the frame or do a batch selecting a range of frames, and scan it to RAW. Then, in VueScan, I import those RAW scans and export them with some light IR and sometimes play around in the color tab with some setting.

It doesn't make a difference what setting I select in color (even AutoLevels), I invariably end up with a washed out scan that has a blue-green tint. I then usually load it up in PS and go into the RGB channels and everything then looks fine.

However, the PS step seems unnecessary. If I use the default settings in Epson Scan, I get a good image (color and exposure), but it involves some unwanted clipping that has to be adjusted on a frame-to-frame basis.

The true revelation was loading up a trial of SilverFast SE 8 and getting great scans (color and exposure). However, as I've read the comments equating the two products, I should be able to expect good scans (decent color and exposure) of my 35MM color negatives right from VueScan.

Any idea what I am doing wrong? Or is it just the unspoken truth that I have to take a poor image out of VueScan and manipulate it in PS?

BTW, I'm not interested in ColorPerfect. I am running CS6 on a Mac and it's not supported.

Also... I need to be clear. I am not talking about a light color cast. I am talking about ALL my images, regardless of roll (Fuji, Kodak) coming out of VueScan as washed out and blue-green.

I reset VueScan to the default options today and wound up getting the same results after my first preview and then going in and locking the exposure/base color. After a couple of months of fooling around with the app, that has the worst interface ever, I'm ready to switch to SilverFast.

Anyone got any clue where I went wrong?

 

[RichW]

I tried Vuescan and Silverfast and overall I find Vuescan gives me a much better image overall with better dynamic range

I tend to just try and get the most flat and neutral looking image I can to begin with and do ALL the adjustments thereafter in photoshop and lightroom as this will beat any specific picture and film settings in the scanner software IMO.

If you want more details I can share my exact workflow, I don't claim that it's perfect but it has taken me a long time to perfect, by the way some of my gallery images aren't great examples as I don't really bother with perfect scans for the web - only if I print

Cheers, Richard

 

[Rogier]

After manny tries and tribulations I just leave everything on "Auto" with a generic film choice. Sometimes a correction in brightness. To more you try to mess with color profiles and calibration the worse the results get....

 

[Pete B]

I'm afraid I've struggled for a long time to get decent colour using Vuescan and Photoshop with limited success so I'll be interested to see if anyone can improve on my results.
I'm presently using a Profile the negative routine:
Here I've set the Input tag to color negative and prescanned.
Then cropped an inter-frame section of the negative and ticked Lock Exposure then prescanned again.
Then ticked the Lock Film Base Color then prescanned again.
Then ticked the Lock Image Color and prescanned again.
Then I cropped the frame and scanned. If you bring up the B/W graph histogram(tools) you can now alter clipping points to ensure there's no clipping giving me this:



With Photoshop I can get an acceptable result by pressing control+M (option + M on mac?) to bring up the curves dialogue box. On this box is "Options" above the preview toggle. Press options and choose the best combination of "Algorithms" +/- snap neutral midtones. This gave me this (After playing with curves and sharpening):




I'm sure some will be cringing at this good-enough-for-military-use result but it's the best I can offer. I sometimes feel I get better results with hitting auto in epsonscan or silverfast. My big problem is always reds. I suspect the car in the photo is red. Trouble is, the skin tones look pretty good on my monitor so messing with colour balance doesn't really improve things. In the past I've messed with LAB but with limited success.
I'm hoping the new Plustek 120 will give me better results.
If anyone can actually show how to get a better result it would be great. I've asked on several forums but posts are rarely informative. Usually links to extensive reading, or disparaging comments about consumer scanners, use colorperfect etc.
Try not to get down about this depressing subject for which there are few if any answers!
Pete

 

[Pete B]

Re-reading your post, I think I've been through exactly what you've been through. After months of messing with vuescans both Positive and negative then manipulating in Photoshop and other PP programs, I hit auto on Silverfast and got a great result. It's just the clipping that does my head in. I'm considering the full version of silverfast when the Plustek comes out. Maybe it's worth the money. I'll just keep a laptop specifically for scanning so I don't have to update the operating system and splash out on an upgrade of silverfast.
Pete

 

[serious]

Not bad results...

Not bad results...

Pete, I'd be happy with you results. Mine have a really noticeable color-cast and would be washed out. I notice that I don't follow suit with your method, of adjusting the black/white point in Graph B&W.

However, when I just tried that it doesn't allow me to set the arrows on the ends of histogram. I can slide the arrows in, but it stops just short of incorporating the full range of values. I have no idea why it does this. When I scanned the image, after setting the black/white points as far as I could (which still fell short of this histogram's range), I still got a scan like before. No improvement.

I'd be curious, Rich and Pete, if you put down a step-by-step of your processes. Like I said, I've read the book and a few things online, so I have an idea of what to do. But for whatever reason, even with resetting to the default options, I can't get a neutral scan that seems remotely acceptable.

In Pete's case, I'd say you sweetened the image in PS. Whereas I have to go into PS just to correct an image to look neutral.

To maybe find my error, here is my method.

1. Preview scan (image looks blue-green)
2. Set crop to maximum and turn off multi-crop. Now select a blank frame at the head of a roll and adjust crop.
3. Preview, then lock exposure. Repeat preview and lock base color.
4. Go into to crop and change to 35mm negative. Now when I click on individual frames, I see the exposure changes each time. (sometime blue-green, sometimes neutral images)
5. Change to a Batch List and tell it to scan frames 1-6.
6. To be safe, I set Border to 5 and Buffer to 10.
7. Set Output to RAW.
8. Set it to 64bit (RGB+I) and hit scan
9. Import RAW images, apply infared light and save. (blue-green images)

As you can see I don't adjust the points on the Graph B&W or set a white-balance point any step. Should I?

 

[Pete B]

I know why you aren't able to move the cursors fully. It's because you haven't "Lock image color" after a prescan following your "Lock Film Base Color".
Once you've ticked "Lock Image Color" and done another prescan you will see that you have 3 (R,G,B) black and white cursors that, once you've scanned the image, you can adjust outside of the histogram.

I seem to get a poor result if I prescan using the leader. Try cropping the interframe portion of the film. Ed said that you can select anything as long as there is at least 5% unexposed film
I outlined my settings here but this is from when I was trying for linear scans for ColorPerfect. The only difference now is that I save as a TIFF, not a RAW TIFF (which is inverted), and don't crop a blank frame but crop the inter-frame portion of the film.

So, after you've done those 4 prescans, hit the scan button and adjust each separate "white" cursor to just a little beyond the end of each of the R,G,B histograms to ensure no clipping, then save the scan. (You should have auto save switched off).
Pete

 

[cabbiinc]

A few things here.

Lock Film Base Color has been broken for me for a while. I used to be able to do it, now no matter how many times I try as soon as I'm not at the frame that I'm previewing to do the lock film base it unchecks. This is on my HP flatbed as well as my Canon and Nikon dedicated film scanners. It started with the Nikon scanner and now doesn't work for any of them.

A raw scan saved at the time of scan will discard locking the film base anyways. It discards nearly everything. A raw scan saved at the time of save incorporates more corrections. A Tiff file will still retain a lot more info than a jpeg while giving you more control in Vuescan over the output.

If your preview dpi is set too low (and I've found Automatic is too low) it doesn't have enough pixels to calculate the exposure and adjustments. Try taking the Preview dpi off auto and setting it to the lowest preassigned setting (calculated by dividing the scanners max dpi by 3 or 4) rather than auto (calculated to scan the entire preview area at roughly 4 million pixels total) or even the next value up from that.

I set buffer to 15. 10 is better than the default of 5, but I find it's much more consistent at 15. I wouldn't be afraid to try even higher.

Output color space should be something better than sRGB. I use Adobe RGB (simply because it's very common in photo editors) but others should be good too. It does affect the gamma of the file (I admit this is a bit of a mystery to me though).

I usually use Color Balance> Auto Levels for most outdoor shots (daylight), WhiteBalance for most indoor shots (typical snapshotesque with flash), Neutral for night time or skyline or landscape shots and manual when all else fails.

I leave the film vendor set to Generic as those profiles are so out of date and not very useful. I also set my black point to 0.08 and my Curve low to 0.28, but I'm not using an Epson scanner. You may find a different setting best.

I also have an iT8 target that I've profiled all of my scanners. This has probably made the biggest difference for me. It's not a magic bullet, but I do find it necessary.

After all that most files I scan are just fine scanned as jpegs straight out of Vuescan. The raw files were intended to be rescanned in Vuescan rather than a Photoshop file.

 

[Jamie123]

You say they 'come out of Vuescan' with a color cast. How does the preview inside Vuescan look? I've had similar problems with Vuescan recently but finally I just gave up and switched back to Nikon Scan.

 

[serious]

Surprising Results

Surprising Results

Jamie, yes my preview is blue-green. I just reset everything again to defaults. Even after doing lock exposure, lock base color, lock image color it's still blue-green.

Any idea how to get rid of this color cast?


Also, thanks for tip about enlarging the preview scan dpi. Just did that.

But the real winning advice was to do 4 preview scans, to enable the RGB black/white points. Thanks Pete!

I went ahead and did that and now have an acceptable quality image. However, this feels VERY similar to what I wanted to avoid doing with every image in PS. It seems like there should be someway to do a clean, neutral scan without tweaking these points. According to the VueScan book, this option of "locking the image color" should only be reserved for when an entire roll is shot in the same location, under the same lighting conditions.

Therefore, can I just batch capture 12 various frames with "image color" locked, or do I need to do this tweak for each frame? If so, then it's no better than adjusting it PS later.

Also, will these changes carry through to saving RAW files? Or should I skip that intermediary step, as it already seems like I'm editing the image to make it acceptable? Which looks like it could get in the way of quickly batch scanning a number of 35MM color negatives.

Meanwhile I'm getting a great image right from SilverFast, without such heavy-handed tweaking.

BEFORE

AFTER IMAGE COLOR LOCK

What I want to know, is EVERYONE doing 4 previews using "Image Color Lock?" If not, then how are the scans coming out as acceptable?

Thanks!!!

 

[RichW]

Ok here is what I do -

Set Vuescan up to scan at the very highest resolution possible (it's always better to downsize later), set it to tif, 48 Bit RGB Slide Film, don't worry if it's a colour or b&w negative, set colour balance to none, curve low - 0.25, curve high - 0.75, dont set any specific settings such as film type etc just leave it all manual also for the best possible image quality set it to do a multi exposure and 2 passes

So anyway scan the film and it may look something like this -

After that open it in Photoshop, invert it then crop away the black borders (important so the next step works correctly), add a levels adjustment layer - Click auto, after that if the the image lacks a lot of contrast drag the middle slider in the levels down a bit so the image just looks better but dont make it too contrasty - try to keep it quite flat. It should now look more like this -

Flatten the image and save again as a tif. Ok most of the work has now been done, next take it into Lightroom for the final edit and first adjust the exposure if necessay, then the white balance, the highlights and finally fiddle with the curves, the image should now be more or less finished -

Well anyway this is my workflow, takes a while (photoshop actions can be made to make the process quicker) but then I only scan images that I want to keep, most I don't bother with as they're usually not that great 😀

Cheers, Richard

 

[serious]

SilverFast comparison

SilverFast comparison

Thanks Rich for the info... I remember seeing a Mac app that someone made recently that will handle inverting a batch of negative scans. However, I can't recall where I saw the link... If anyone knows the link, I'd appreciate it. I think I agree with your approach of just using VueScan for scanning RAW tiffs and then taking them elsewhere.

Also... I wanted to add the SilverFast SE 8 scan I just did of the same frame, using their demo version. Instead of wasting 10mins doing 4 preview scans and then manually manipulating the image, I did one preview and scanned this right away. It ended up with more accurate color and sharper contrast.

With all his nonsense on the VueScan site about branding SilverFast a "failure," I'm surprised how much easier SilverFast is at delivering results I want. I'm not looking forward to tricking VueScan to deliver equal results and it speaks to how poor VueScan is that you have to go through 4 levels of preview scans before you can get the one option that actually rectifies the issue I'm having with my scans.

 

[serious]

Mr. Fizzlesticks, I want to see your point. After all, there are numerous people equating the two products as equal.

That said, I'm still waiting for the response saying "You're doing it all wrong..." Instead the only thing that has fixed my issue involves 10mins of prep. Possibly for each image that has different lighting and color temp... And that option isn't intuitive.

I don't want to drop a ton of cash on SilverFast and already have a Pro version of VueScan. If I can get VueScan doing 12 35mm color negative frames done in a batch scan, with decent color and contrast, then I'm happy. Still can't figure that out (despite reading a book).

 

[nighstar]

i wish i could help, but i struggle with very much the same thing you do. i've never tried Silverfast, but now i'm tempted... i really don't like spending the amount of time that i do just getting a scan to look like it should.

 

[c.poulton]

I tried Vuescan quite a few times in the past with various middling results but just couldn't get on with it - no matter what settings I tried I just couldn't get a half decent scan (OK, it's probably me and my lack of knowledge). Switched to Silverfast 8 and bingo, worked pretty well first time for me. I ended up buying the software.

 

[Jamie123]

Jamie, yes my preview is blue-green. I just reset everything again to defaults. Even after doing lock exposure, lock base color, lock image color it's still blue-green.

Ah now I see what you mean. Actually that blue-green cast is simply the inverted yellow-red (i.e. orange) of the film mask. If you were to scan the negs as positives and just invert them in photoshop you'd get exactly that. Are you using any of the negative profiles in Vuescan?

 

[Pete B]

SilverFast SE 8 scan ................ I did one preview and scanned this right away. It ended up with more accurate color and sharper contrast.

I'm surprised how much easier SilverFast is at delivering results I want.

That's what I found hence my desire to get the new Plustek 120 with Siverfast 8

Pete

 

[cabbiinc]

The thing that bugs me about Silverfast is:
a) you've got to buy a license for every scanner model you have or will have.
b) most of my scanners aren't supported on my current OS (windows 7 64 bit).
To each their own though, if SF works better for your workflow than VS and the price is right then by all means have at it. Then we can get back to topics like what's your favorite film.

Serious, can you upload a raw scan somewhere so that we can take a whack at it? Wouldn't have to be at full resolution, but a full frame or even two frames on the same scan would work.

 

[Pete B]

Just for comparison
Silverfast auto everything scan, no sharpening:



Epsonscan auto everything batch scan, no sharpening:



Fizzlestick's method Vuescan uncorrected:

 

[Pete B]

Fizzlestick's method corrected in photoshop: