Workflow for scanning on Coolscan 9000

<p>Hi all,</p>

<p>I guess this might have been asked before but if so please just point me towards the most relevant thread. I did a quick search but couldn't see any recent posts on the subject...</p>

<p>Anyways, I have managed to finally purchase a Coolscan 9000. My main usage will be to scan 6x7 transparencies (mostly Velvia/Provia) and also some negatives (B&W - Ilford, TriX, Colour - Portra, Ektar). I did have a Coolscan 5000 before and had some kind of workflow but I want to start again from scratch to create a new one. The old workflow was a little hotch potch and didn't always give predictable results. I do have Nikon Scan v4.0.3 and Vuescan already. I have managed to get the CS 9000 recognized and working under Windows Vista 64-bit (thanks to this incredibly useful thread here :</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00Ryck</p>

<p>So, essentially I am looking for a professional workflow to get from the raw neg/slide to a 'Master' and then a 'Working File'. Some initial questions I have:</p>

 

<ol>

<li>How useful for general scanning are the ICE, DEE, GEM, ROC functions? If not general usage, when would you use them?</li>

<li>I believe it is always best to get a Master file at 16-bit, 4000dpi as the first step but these things weigh in at 550MB for a 6x7 slide. I don't mind storing this file in an archive (TeraByte drives are cheap these days) but what steps are involved in going from this to a file I can work with in Photoshop/Lightroom, etc?</li>

<li>My initial experience is that Vuescan is a little slower than NikonScan with the CS9000. Is that the general consensus? I do appreciate having the ability to use colour management in VS (I have the Wolf Faust 35mm IT8 targets). Do people generally find using the IT8 targets helps obtain the best 'Original' colour rendition?</li>

</ol>

<p>Thanks again,<br>

Rick</p>

<p>I don't use ICE, period. It will more often than not damage your image. I do use GEM and ROC at times, but they too will soften grain and sometimes can blow out highlights. You have to set up Nikon Scan a bit before using them. <br /> I haven't tested Vuescan against Nikon Scan very much, but brief testing results showed Nikon Scan to be better. I also much prefer the UI for Nikon Scan over Vuescan. SilverFast may be better than Nikon Scan to some, but it's expensive. I scan 6x7cm, 6x4.5, and 6x6cm negs all the time with my Nikon 9000 and the results are outstanding. 35mm results are much better on the 9000 than the Coolscan V as well.<br>

I do not have an IT8 target. From what I understand, they are only good for the kind of film they are made on. I do not have a calibrated monitor at home, so I just wing it for the most part. I love the Nikon 9000. It's expensive but for medium format, it's the best deal for the money out there. </p>

<p>The IT8 targets help some for E-6 film, and enormously on K-14 film. The latter probably isn't relevant to you.<br>

My own feeling is that the important adjustments in Nikon scan are analog gain (so that you don't clip either end of the dynamic range) and of course adjusting the histograms (mostly endpoints) for R, G, and B. The rest you want to do in your photo editor, where you know color management is at it's best.<br>

Obviously, you need to decide what color space to scan into. sRGB doesn't induce as much hair pulling, but you can't get the full gamut of E-6 or C-41 film into it. Larger color spaces can get more gamut, but require you to be even more obsessive and expert about color management. They also demand 16-bit scans, where you can get away with 8-bit scans in sRGB.<br>

Color management, and a calibrated monitor, are of course a must.<br>

ROC is astounding for faded Ektachrome, and quite irrelevant for new images.<br>

ICE works, and lets you be less obsessive about dust, but comes at a slight cost in sharpness, and a noticeable cost in increased scan times.<br>

By 6x7 negatives, I don't thing GEM is much of an issue. (What grain?)<br>

Plan ahead for a dedicated scanning machine (not on the Internet) that will be where your Coolscan 9000 will be forever. Nikon isn't going to write drivers for Windows 8, or whatever comes next. Nikon will not be making any film scanners by then.</p>

<p>I don't have 9000, but a V. Some of the same stuff applies. Personally, I don't see what the advantage is at all in editing scans in Lightroom. Photoshop can do pretty much everything Lightroom can do and more. Some of the tools have convenient interfaces, but it's hard to compete with the masking and blending modes of Photoshop, not to mention doing adjustments in Lab space.</p>

<p>ICE saves time spotting, but I find it does hurt sharpness and doesn't catch everything. I've been saving my files as RGBA files, where the 4th channel is the IR channel. A photoshop action converts it into something useable and you can quite quickly use the healing brush to affect only the dust/scratches. I have a decent action set for this, but haven't had the time to polish it up for public consumption yet. </p>

<p>I find Vuescan MUCH faster than Nikonscan. I've actually been playing around a lot with my color scanning workflow recently. More about that in a second. For B&W, they are about the same. I'd recommend scanning a flat 16 bit file and adjusting in Photoshop. Since it's a black and white file, you don't have to worry about affecting color, etc.; it's all about contrast.</p>

<p>For color, its a bit more complicated. Slides work out well in either. Color negative is just ok in Vuescan in my opinion. From my testing, it DOES make a difference in color whether or not you do adjustments in Vuescan or wait to do them all in Photoshop. Some adjustments made in Vuescan really are better. This is because it's working directly from the linear negative data, and not from a gamma corrected inverted image. Like it or not, gamma corrections, contrast changes, and the way the file is inverted does affect color saturation and accuracy. Nikonscan does a better job out of the box; Vuescan is faster.</p>

<p>The solution I'm creeping towards is doing my color scans as 'raw' scans. Raw scans are uninverted linear gamma scans. One might think you could invert in photoshop and gamma correct it to get a good image, but you can't. To make a long story short, inverting in photoshop is wrong; it's 1-rgb instead of 1/rgb. Also, once you start changing the gamma (gray slider in levels) by large amounts, the photoshop calculation gets off. </p>

<p>Ok, enough of that. The solution I find is either do a home-rolled solution, which is what I've been working on, or buying ColorPerfect by CF Systems. ColorPerfect does a pretty good job and it's reasonably priced, but the interface is pretty awful. It makes Vuescan look great. Fortunately, once you get it set up, you really don't need to do much in the program. Just run the filter on your raw scan, pick your film, adjust the black level to about the right place, and maybe click a neutral tone to white balance and hit ok. Then you can fine tune in Photoshop. You can try ColorPerfect out for free which is nice.</p>

<p>I'm building a home-rolled pipeline that uses ImageMagick to invert the negative and set the gamma for me. It's a bit slower, but it's free and I've had fun writing it. I might look into writing a compiled version for more speed. We'll see.</p>

<p>I'm in the process of writing all this up with a comparison, but it's not there yet. Long story short:<br>

- B&W - Vuescan -> Photoshop<br>

- Slide - It's all equally good/bad -> Photoshop<br>

- Color Neg - Raw scan + ColorPerfect/custom inversion is best, Nikon scan is pretty good, Vuescan is so-so, then finish off in Photoshop.</p>

<p>I'm sure Silverfast is good. I've played with it some, but the results I got didn't warrant the price. </p>

<p>I have a Coolscan 9000. Regarding the conversion of the linear scans of negatives, I have been quite happy with Colorperfect plug-in. I did spent a little time to get familiar with the interface (probably a couple of hours at most) and, to be honest, I don't think I have been using all the functions and potentials it has. What I adjust most are highlights, color balance and saturation and normally i only spend a couple of minutes on each image. However, the resulting images have been excellent and are definitely better than the straight negative scans out of Nikon Scan in terms of contrast and color. i highly recommend Colorperfect.</p>

<p>I'd use ICE on the less powerful mode and ignore the other post-processing options (GEM, ROC). Here's my workflow: http://www.jingai.com/scanningguide/ </p>

<p>Colorperfect is also worth considering. I like its functionality.</p>

<p>It's important to note, that if you're trying to use Nikon Scan on a more recent Mac than a G5, you're using it in compatibility mode, so it's going to be about 50% slower than on a G5. Windows XP can run Nikon Scan perfectly, and Windows 7 can run the newest version of Nikon Scan, but I use WinXP Pro for scanning. I still think Nikon Scan is overall the best scanning software for the Coolscan scanners as it offers features Vuescan and others can't offer (like ICE, and ROC and GEM).</p>

<p>ICE works great (except, of course, on traditional B&W). If you see any effect of ICE on sharpness, I think it's because the film wasn't bleached properly at the end of development, so that there is still silver there, which gets interpreted as dust, with bad results. Mostly happens in high-density parts of the image.</p>

<p>I don't see the point of GEM, etc. Better to do such processing later, so you can play around without having to re-scan.</p>

 

<p>Thanks for the replies. Here are some further comments:</p>

<p><strong>1) ICE. </strong>Upon an initial test it seems that although it does a great job of removing dust specks it does in fact damage the image somewhat if viewed at high magnification. Now you may argue that nobody really will notice the damage as they will never view the image at that level but it should be noted. Here is the example to demonstrate. Below is a close up crop area of sky from one of my images. Both left and right images are a 4x multisample but the right has ICE applied (default setting). I've included a couple different zoom levels so you can see the effect.</p>

<p>100% Zoom<br>

<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/11457010-lg.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="364" /></p>

<p>300% Zoom<br>

<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/11457011-lg.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="363" /></p>

<p>500% Zoom<br>

<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/11457012-lg.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="365" /></p>

<p>After this test unless there is a way around this I will be tempted to find another way to remove dust, etc. Whereas I think ICE will be invaluable for scanning a large amount of negatives in a 'batch' fashion I think for more specific work scanning individual images for the end result of a high quality fine art print or similar it will be better to scan without ICE applied. Happy to hear comments otherwise...</p>

<p><strong>2) DEE, GEM, ROC</strong> - Based on feedback here and my own thoughts I think I will leave these options alone unless for some reason I have some faded slides to deal with (highly unlikely for my intended work).<br>

<strong>3) Colour management.</strong> I was looking for a ProPhotoRGB colour space in Nikon Scan but I don't believe it is there. I know Vuescan can output in this colour space so that's at least one argument for using VS over NS... Is AbobeRGB the widest colour space available in NikonScan?<br>

<strong>4) Inversion.</strong> Tim,l I believe you discussion above about inverting scans refers to colour negative? Up till now (with my Coolscan 5000) I was using Vuescan with the default 'Generic Color Negative' setting to get the images into Photoshop where I would correct any imbalances to try and capture a films characteristics... It was a very unreliable workflow and I will have to experiment with some of your techniques and the software from C F Systems.<br>

<strong>5) Analog Gain.</strong> I would be interested to hear more about how to use the analog gain settings in NikonScan/Vuescan to obtain the optimum scan detail. In Vuescan I previously used to just use the RAW curve to move the left and right end points as far out as they would go in the belief that would avoid any under/over exposure...</p>

<p>Thanks again,<br>

Rick</p>

<p>ICE is very helpful in removing dust and also Fuji pepper grain if you scan slides. I found Vuescan IR cleaning (light) to reduce less image detail than ICE (normal), but either are really pixel peeping at sizes you would never think to output.</p>

<p>For 4 and 5 my thoughts are in the link I posted.</p>

<p>I have had a Nikon 9000 for 3.5 years now, and have tried Vuescan, Nikonscan, and SilverFast. I have used it on a MAC and Windows Vista machine. Based upon my experience, here is my two-cents worth: Buy a MAC and the SilverFast Archive Suite. The SilverFast Archive Suite bundles two programs: SilverFast Ai IT8 Studio and SilverFast HDR Studio. As stated at SilverFast.com: "Since both programs are equipped with optimum functions, you will enjoy maximum processing speed as well as an efficient workflow. An integrated color management system that meets professional standards completes the convincing package." I completely agree with this statement. And with a MAC, you scan just once using SilverFast Ai IT8 Studio, where the file is saved as an HDRi 64bit file (it includes the infrared channel). (With a Windows machine, you can't scan into an HDRi file for the Nikon 9000 scanner.) Then, you post process using SilverFast HDR Studio, where you can play around with whether you want to use ICE or not, etc. Now here is an important point that I learned the hard way: even if you never intend to scan transparencies, CALIBRATE the scanner with an E-6 target to create an icc profile. The reason is that for post-processing a C-41 color negative film raw HDRi file, the software will use this icc profile to get the colors right. When you scan, make sure you choose icc color management, and that the generated icc profile created by the SilverFast calibration feature is indeed the icc profile associated with your raw HDRi scan.<br>

Now I know this will cost money, but consider that you have bought a professional level medium format scanner, and as you know it didn't come cheap. You might as well get the best out of your scanner. Sometimes there are good discounts on the SilverFast Archival Suite. (You can always call them and ask for a discount.)<br>

I have no financial interest in SilverFast. It is just that it took me a couple of years of scanning frustration until I learned first-hand of the advantages of the Archive Suite on a MAC for the Nikon 9000 scanner.</p>

<p>Benny,<br>

Thanks for your reply. I appreciate the advice but I'm not sure I am ready right now to purchase a new computer (MAC) and Silverfast. I do understand that it might save me some frustration which it looks like you already went through but I need to understand the limitations of my current setup before I open the cheque book again :-)</p>

<p>Rick</p>

<p>Understood, Rick. In today's lousy economy, we all need to be careful with money. Of course, you don't have to get a MAC because scanning into raw on a Windows machine can still be done by doing ICE at scanning time. But I do recommend the SilverFast Archive Suite. Sometimes it is sold at a discount for around $300. It will save you tons of time.</p>