Vuescan

[schmoozit]

That's interesting, jlw. I think I'll have a play with that just for fun. With Vuescan, I never use the brightness function. It starts introducing noise pretty quickly, it seems. I have learned to use the film base color settings for each channel to push the brightness into an acceptable range and reduce noise. It seems to work better. That's another reason I use the method I do; when I want to make an adjustment, the control I need is already there waiting for me to tweak it.

Other than that, and from what I can imagine, I'd think that scanning a slide (esp. Velvia and such) would be and is (in my experience) the hardest job to do well for scanners... all scanners. I understand your point about the metallic content of black and white film, but from experience, it seems easier for my scanners to handle than slides. Black and white has a wide lattitude, which means the information actually on the film is lower contrast than on narrow lattitude slides. Scanner and software are most challenged with slides, I believe.

 

[Honu-Hugger]

Honu-Hugger - Please give us an update on your new scanner once you get it running.

Robert

😀 I'm afraid that all updates will be in the form of questions!
(how does the Gamma curve relate to the learning curve? 🙂)

 

[kaiyen]

Scanning slides is a lot harder, and is especially difficult with Velvia, which is generally pretty high contrast and therefore high density. I scan slides as images and set it to do 6 passes, plus a long exposure pass. I seem to get pretty good results with this.

Again, it's also a matter of using the right film for the right situation -it's just that the technique side of things removes the entire development step since e6 is standardized. If I use velvia when it's contrasty outside, my scans won't capture the depth of the slide. But if I use Velvia under less contrasty situations, I get some nice stuff. Similarly, Astia under contrasty situations has that great yet natural look.

allan

 

[schmoozit]

(how does the Gamma curve relate to the learning curve? 🙂)

You don't want to know! 🙂

 

[djon]

Kaiyen's right about the importance of choosing the right film for the situation...in general I have a very hard time with any chrome in broad daylight because I'm at a high altitude (5200') with lots of UV and glaring sunlight...Velvia's rarely the right film for me, Sensia's lower contrast and I've done better work with it. I do think color neg makes more sense in some situations, but I hate dealing with minilabs and my local pro labs don't deliver CDs...

I don't agree that slides are harder to scan than negatives...they're simply less satisfactory when their inherent contrast becomes a problem. In other words, if your slide starts out too contrasty, you've made a mistake, it's usually pretty much beyond hope.

Multiple pass scanning reduces sharpness in exchange for dubious gains in shadow detail...might be OK with large format....better to use more appropriate film in the first place.