A few things I don't care for in that tutorial. Before I tell you please accept this as just my opinion and I'm not claiming to be an expert.
- Media, he tells you to always scan in greyscale. I'd say do that first, and if that doesn't work try RGB. The reason why can be found on Hamrick's website:
On most scanners, setting
Input | Media to "Color negative" will increase the green exposure time by 2.5x and the blue exposure time by 3.5x. This results in adjusting for the green and blue absorption by the orange mask of the film. If the film doesn't have an orange mask, then using "Color negative" will result in a raw scan file that looks very cyan.
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc21.htm#topic18
To state one way is correct and the other is incorrect without first clarifying what you're scanning in the first place can be right some times and wrong others.
- 16 bit grey, again if that works for you great, if not then maybe you should try 48 bit rgb. To let the program convert to grayscale then take it into post production and try to tweak the levels seams a bit like shooting in a digital camera in jpeg then trying to do extensive levels adjustments. Why would you when you could just get the whole spectrum to work with? I do agree that 8 bit is usually not worth it unless you like exactly what's coming out of the scanner and you plan to just leave it at that.
-Preview Resolution, Auto should work for any dedicated film scanner. It calculates the preview to be roughly 4mp. On a flatbed 4mp is rather low quality and doesn't give enough information to calculate what the in scanner adjustments are going to be, and all adjustments are made with the preview scan. So if your "exposure" in the scanner is drastically different from the preview increasing that dpi can usually fix that. If that has no effect then put it back to Auto.
- Auto Focus, I so no reason to not set focus to Scan. After all, you're not capturing the scan from the preview so sharpness usually isn't an issue. It just makes the scanner wait to focus on the preview when it's going to also focus on the scan. Focusing for just the scan is a time saver in my opinion, unless you're choosing what frames to scan based on the sharpness of the preview.
- Fine Mode, my scanner doesn't have this. I'd try with it on or off. You can read what it does at
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc28.htm#inputfinemode
- Multisampling, don't bother. I agree, while I've seen a slight difference with it on or off it's minimal to say the least even on the most difficult slides.
- Multiexposure, he doesn't mention this. I occasionally use this when the dynamic range of the scene may not be captured entirely by the scanner. This is not something I have set all of the time and is used more like a hail marry pass situations ("this scan just won't work with anything else, it's too dark, try multiexposure").
- Filters, I agree with what's said.
- White and Black points. Setting them both to 0% is something that used to zero out the program. Some time ago that changed, and now setting white point to 1 is the same as what setting it to zero used to be. It's also what the program defaults too.
- Leave Curves alone, I usually apply a slight increase to Curve Low from 25% (default) to 28-30%. This adds just a touch of contrast.
- Output Color Space. Use Adobe RGB if you're using Photoshop to touch things up. It's like feeding your car with the correct octane gas. While your car seems to run ok with other octanes, it's designed to use a certain octane and is maximized at that.
- Film Type, Ed Hamrick (the author of Vuescan) said (somewhere that I can't verify or find at the moment) that he only uses film profiles provided by the manufacturer of the specified film. This film profile changes the way the program perceives the colors coming out of the scanner.
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc24.htm#topic21 If you look up the various film types you'll see that not only are the 3 films that Chris mentions is there but also a lot of variations on those films based on the density of the negative. So how are you supposed to know which one to use? I'm sure there's a way for Vuescan to tell you, it has an option under Prefs|Enable Density Display, but I'm not exactly sure how it's used. But even if you did know the density of your Kodak film will setting one of these profiles override other adjustments that can compensate for other things like the age of the light source within your scanner? IDK.
I just used Generic. There's too many other variables that make this very slight changes too to worry about.
- Printed Size, this just sets what the "dpi" value will be saved at, not at what dpi it is scanned at though. So if you open the file in a photo editor like PS CS2 and you have the ruler set to show inches the scans will always import at .9 x 1.3 inches (or there about) for a 35mm scan. If you set the Printed Size to Fixed DPI at 300 the exact same scan with the exact same number of pixels will come out to 5.7 x 8.8 inches (35mm frame, 2000 scanner dpi). Again this is the same number of pixels, you've just stated a different dpi to measure it, which still doesn't change anything because you've got the same pixels and they even display at 72 dpi (or whatever you have your editor set too or your display monitor displays). i.e. this setting is absolutely non-critical. The only real time to worry about this would be if you have a printer that insists the dpi setting makes a difference and rather than try to explain how it really doesn't you can just default Vuescan to give them what they think they want.
- File Type: It's a personal preference. If I like what's coming straight out of the scanner I'll use Jpeg. If I think it needs lots of work then I'll use RAW (which is an unprocessed tiff). If you want to have an unprocessed tiff that's inverted (a neg is now a positive image) then checking RAW Save Film does that. When I use raw, much of the setting discussed here are discarded because I use RAW Output with Scan, if I wanted to include all of these adjustments I'd use RAW Output with Save. If you want to go with Tiff's and not RAW files and that works for you I'm going to say more power to you. Use what works and go with it. Some people like a RAW DNG, but that was more of an afterthought in Vuescan and it wasn't really designed for it. Still some people like it.
- Tiff Compression, None. I agree and for the same reasons Chris states.
- Tiff File Type. If 16 bit Gray works for you then go for it. If you need more then increase to 48 bit RGB.
One more thing Chris didn't mention that I do:
- Crop Tab, Buffer %. Setting that to 15% or higher keeps the edge of the image from affecting the exposure of the scan. If you have a lens that vignettes and you're getting blown centers then your vignette is being included into too much of the calculation, the buffer % is like how much you want to spot meter (95% being a 5% spot meter but that's probably far too aggressive).
Again, take any of this with a grain of salt. I've tried to tell why I do what I do so that you can make your own mind up on what you want to try.
