Vuescan is driving me crazy!

[Jamie123]

So for a while now I've been getting awful scans with Vuescan and my Nikon 9000. I had to switch to Vuescan last year when I updated to OS Lion on my Mac and Nikon Scan stopped working. First I thought the problem was the calibration profile as my Spyder 2 didn't work with Lion either. So a while back I finally bought a Spyder 4 calibration device and it did actually improve the scans a little bit.
But just a little. I'm still getting horrible scans. It's like the frames are heavily underexposed and the scan is pushed (with very noisy shadows). I've been worrying that my Nikon CS9000 is broken but today I tried it with a demo version of Silverfast and the scan of a frame that looked horrible before looked perfect right away. So it's got to be the software.

There's no chance I'm gonna shell out €500 for Silverfast so I'll probably have to get an external HD to run Snow Leopard and go back to using NikonScan. But just before I go this route, does anybody have an idea what the problem with Vuescan could be?

 

[Trius]

I would ask the vendor (Hamrick) for support. If you had VueScan installed prior to installing Lion, you may want to trash the current installation and install again.

 

[rich815]

Man, I love Vuescan and have used it almost exclusively for almost 10 years now with Epson scanners, and my Nikon 4000 and 9000. I will say though that most of my work is B&W. For color slides it's good, for color negs it's hit and miss depending on the emulsion. Which are you scanning? Can you share more details on your settings and your workflow?

 

[Bob Michaels]

Man, I love Vuescan and have used it almost exclusively for almost 10 years now with Epson scanners, and my Nikon 4000 and 9000.

Richard: good to hear from you!

Rich815 was the one who encouraged me to give Vuescan a try almost 10 years ago. When I first started printing digitally, I had never seen another hybrid print, so Richard send me a box full printed different ways. I still owe him for his early help and encouragement.

 

[Bob Michaels]

Jamie123: are you making decisions based on the way the file that comes out of the scanner or what your final prints look like after adjustment in your image editor? I have always found that the flat crappy looking scan ends up with the best final prints after adjustment.

If all else fails, use the base defaults in Vuescan. After almost 10 ten years of using Vuescan, I am convinced that is really good. Other than a few tweaks on image size, that is what I use. Do not over complicate it trying to get the best looking scan.

 

[Godfrey]

Jamie123: are you making decisions based on the way the file that comes out of the scanner or what your final prints look like after adjustment in your image editor? I have always found that the flat crappy looking scan ends up with the best final prints after adjustment.

If all else fails, use the base defaults in Vuescan. After almost 10 ten years of using Vuescan, I am convinced that is really good. Other than a few tweaks on image size, that is what I use. Do not over complicate it trying to get the best looking scan.

Same here. I've been using Vuescan exclusively since 1999 or 2000, when the horrible software with my Minolta scanner was driving me crazy. I've never found much purpose to all the calibration and adjustments, etc. I use the defaults almost exclusively and tweak the settings just a little here and there to maximize the amount of data captured. Then I render the image to a finished state in Lightroom and/or Photoshop.

 

[Mprice]

I've had similar problems with my 9000 and Vuescan with the same system from time to time, seems to come and go, sometimes restarting everything takes care of it, sometimes not.

I'd be interested to hear if anybody has a solution as well. At some point I found that turning the the exposure (? don't have Vuescan in front of me at work but can check it out when I get home) from 1 to 100 got me a lot closer but haven't had to go this route in awhile. Also have installed and reinstalled with no luck.

 

[Jamie123]

Jamie123: are you making decisions based on the way the file that comes out of the scanner or what your final prints look like after adjustment in your image editor? I have always found that the flat crappy looking scan ends up with the best final prints after adjustment.

If all else fails, use the base defaults in Vuescan. After almost 10 ten years of using Vuescan, I am convinced that is really good. Other than a few tweaks on image size, that is what I use. Do not over complicate it trying to get the best looking scan.

It's not that the scans don't look exactly like I want, it's that they come out completely unusable. I'm not new to scanning and I know pretty well what to watch out for with scans but this is just not working. I'd be happy with flat scans but what I'm getting is blown out highlights, pitch black shadows and very noisy midtones.
I've tried the default settings but it didn't help. I'm really losing my patience here. People keep saying Vuescan is good but I've tried to get to grips with it for a long time now and I just don't see it. Nikon Scan was so much better and that's saying something. I think Silverfast is probably the best of all the ones I tried but it's still not worth a fraction of what they're charging for it.

 

[Mprice]

Scanner has also recently been serviced so assuming that isn't the issue.

 

[Godfrey]

It's not that the scans don't look exactly like I want, it's that they come out completely unusable. I'm not new to scanning and I know pretty well what to watch out for with scans but this is just not working. I'd be happy with flat scans but what I'm getting is blown out highlights, pitch black shadows and very noisy mid tones.

When I've seen that with my scanners and Vuescan, I've discarded the Vuescan configuration and reloaded the defaults. Since it happened a couple of times, I made a set of my own defaults for different scanning situations and just load them when I start a scanning session.

G

 

[Rogier]

Reset all preferences by doing the following (as usual at your own risk..):

Go to the user library under the "Go" menu in finder while holding down the "option" key.
Drill down to: Macintosh HD > Users > You XXX > Library
Remove the vuescan.ini and vuescan.log files.
Restart Vuescan.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

It's not that the scans don't look exactly like I want, it's that they come out completely unusable. I'm not new to scanning and I know pretty well what to watch out for with scans but this is just not working. I'd be happy with flat scans but what I'm getting is blown out highlights, pitch black shadows and very noisy midtones.
I've tried the default settings but it didn't help. I'm really losing my patience here. People keep saying Vuescan is good but I've tried to get to grips with it for a long time now and I just don't see it. Nikon Scan was so much better and that's saying something. I think Silverfast is probably the best of all the ones I tried but it's still not worth a fraction of what they're charging for it.

Turn off the infrared cleaning filter. That causes the problem you're seeing on black and white films. If you're shooting color, I'm not sure what to say.

 

[rich815]

It's not that the scans don't look exactly like I want, it's that they come out completely unusable. I'm not new to scanning and I know pretty well what to watch out for with scans but this is just not working. I'd be happy with flat scans but what I'm getting is blown out highlights, pitch black shadows and very noisy midtones.
I've tried the default settings but it didn't help. I'm really losing my patience here. People keep saying Vuescan is good but I've tried to get to grips with it for a long time now and I just don't see it. Nikon Scan was so much better and that's saying something. I think Silverfast is probably the best of all the ones I tried but it's still not worth a fraction of what they're charging for it.

Second request: What are you scanning (B&W, chrome, color neg?) and what are your settings?

Vuescan does work and works really, really well. Something is wrong.

 

[rich815]

Richard: good to hear from you!

Rich815 was the one who encouraged me to give Vuescan a try almost 10 years ago. When I first started printing digitally, I had never seen another hybrid print, so Richard send me a box full printed different ways. I still owe him for his early help and encouragement.

Hi Bob! Long time! Yes, I pop in here off and on. Too busy with work and shooting! Mostly hang at APUG these days.

And I have Bob to thank for finding me my 9000! You own me nothing, my friend. 🙂

 

[Trius]

Rich, your recent stuff on flickr (Golden Gate park and Presidio) is just killer.

 

[astro8]

Rich, your recent stuff on flickr (Golden Gate park and Presidio) is just killer.

++++1!!!!!

 

[EdwardKaraa]

I'm sure Vuescan is a great software judging from the number of happy people using it, but I had exactly the same problems on 2 different scanners, Nikon L5000 and Reflecta 7200. I am currently using Silverfast SE which is very cheap but does the job for me.

 

[CorreCaminos]

I had similar problems with Vuescan until I started resetting it to default options on a regular basis. I also always scan to a raw file and then create a tif from that.

I'm very happy with B&W scans. Tonality from color negs is very good but I can't reliably produce scans w/o color casts. I've tried scanning the film base and locking the exposure/film base color thing several times but can't make that work at all.

I think it's a very good program but it's buggy. Also, it's so configurable that it's easy to set it up to produce unusable scans. Thus, the frequent restting to default options.

 

[Jamie123]

Second request: What are you scanning (B&W, chrome, color neg?) and what are your settings?

Sorry, I should've said this earlier. It is mostly happening with color neg film (kodak portra) although I think I see it in some bw scans, too. I have infrared cleaning turned off anyways so that can't be it.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Turn off the infrared cleaning filter. That causes the problem you're seeing on black and white films. If you're shooting color, I'm not sure what to say.

That was my first thought. The other could be double-profiling (or misprofiling), very common problem. I'm not sure how Microsoft-ish Apple has gone with their latest OS (they certainly have with iTunes and QuickTime), so I don't know if this is an option anymore: check with your Color control panel if you have a profile set for your monitor, then check what you're using with VueScan, then check if you're doing a profile conversion vs. adding vs. not doing anything at all with (let's assume you're using) Photoshop.