Vuescan Settings for Fuji Slides

I've been using Vuescan with my Nikon LS 4000. I've been getting

good results using the generic setting for Fuji slides. I normally

shoot Fuji Sensia II or Provia 100F, but I haven't been able to find

any special settings in Vuescan for these films. There are special

settings for Kodak slide films and a ton of special settings for

negative films of all descriptions. I've scoured the Vuescan menus

and read the users manual from cover to cover. Am I missing

something or are all Fuji slide films intended to be covered by the

generic setting in Vuescan?

Hello. I've just started scanning, and using Vuescan, myself, but

I know that you have not missed something. There are only two

film-type settings for slide film . Others would have to explain

why, but I think it has to do with the nature of colour negatives --

that they are more difficult to colour balance, so that more

choices are necessary. I don't know why Kodak is singled out,

but non-Kodak can also be Agfa or Konica.

<P>As with negative film, choose the setting that makes the

photo look the most promising, and which doesn't clip

information at the endpoints on the histogram. Sometimes

people pick the setting for another brand of film than they are

using. For instance, in a post of Nov. 22, 2002, Mendel Leisk

wrote:

<P>"I've been scanning fuji provia 100 on Minage Scan Dual II

with following settings. I initially save only raw file. Then scan

from disk. I tried scanning as image, but was getting weird color

cast, particularly with yellows. Ektachrome on log dark seems to

work best, and captures more deep shadow detail than image."

<P>I'm sure that others would use different settings again.

<P>Ed Hamrick and many Vuescan users post to the

newsgroup comp.periphs.scanners, which can be searched

(advanced search) at <A

HREF="http://groups.google.com/">http://groups.google.com/</A

>.

For slides, use the "Image" setting (device tab), and not "Slide".<br>

For negs, use the "generic" film setting (color tab).

<p>

I usually obtain the good results with

<ul>

<li>"Log Dark" + "brightness 0.8"

<li>"Log Medium" + "brightness 0.6"

<li>"Log Light" + "brightness 0.4"

</ul>

<p>

Of course, it depends on the slide density/neg detail, you should use this like a starting point to find what settings correspond to each scan.<p>

Each scan has its best settings, that you have to find by try and error.

Hi All,

Since my Nov. 22, 2002 posting of question on Vuescan settings for Fuji Provia, I continued to struggle and posted the following on Dec. 01 (between the quadruple asteriks) on same subject. This post has disappeared from the forum. I've been forming most of my postings and cut and pasting the responses independentally in a text editor, this is what I retained from that post.

Jonathan Ratzlaff's suggestion to scan as image and gamma worked extremely well for me. My big concern had been strange yellow highlights. I still do not understand why they were ocurring. They were very evident with image/log dark, and muted quite a bit (but still evident if I was honest with myself) when using color slide/Kodak Ektachrome/log dark.

Going to IMAGE/GAMMA, with BRIGHTNESS PUSHED UP TO 1.1~, has produced the best result to date, with FUJI PROVIA. The "yellow artifacts" are just not there and the image simply appears to be a faithful rendition of the slide. I don't know why it should be so *%#@ complicated and undocumented, though. It's frustrating that there isn't more concrete documentation with Vuescan on film types, best approaches.

I've really just been playing with this off and on. My main albatross is 1800 old tri-x and xp1 (with magenta cast) images that I'm also struggling with, re tone, brightness, smooth histograms, etc.

****

Sunday, December 01, 2002

posted on digital darkroom:

Subject: Minolta software for slides and Vuescan for negatives?

There was a post here a few days back regarding vuescan settings for scans of Provia100. I suggested trying the Kodak Ektachrome setting. Well, I've been reviewing the few color slide (provia100) scans I've done with my Dimage Scan Dual II (I'm mostly scanning tri-x). After 2 days of thrashing about with various Vuescan settings I tried Minolta's PhotoShop Plug-in again. The result, with no adjustments, seems quite faithful to the slide in the color balance and saturation. The histograms are smooth, exhibiting minor clipping at one end or another, which I suspect is due to my scanners capability.

Looking at Vuescan's film profiles, the preponderance are for negative films. As I recollect my motivation for downloading it was an abysmal attempt to scan a color negative with Minolta software. I then started scanning black and white negatives and found it quite capable.

I'm thinking to scan negative films with Vuescan and colour slides with Minolta. Anyone have any opinions or similar experience?

Here's an earlier thread somewhat on this subject, particularly the last post:

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0019oA

----

Scan them both with Vuescan. Set your media type to image for slides and negative film for negatives. The reason there are so many different settings for negative film is because of the variations in the masks of the negative films. Each one is slightly different. There is much less variation with colour slides so film profiles are not usefue.

Use media for image type <<image for media type?? - ml>> and set your colour balance at neutral. I also set the black point at its default and the white point at about 0.1%. Set the curve at gamma if you are using the later version. Auto exposure works fairly well, however with the way I expose my slides, I generally leave the exposure set at 2 sampling rate at 4X <<this went over my head - ml>>. The noise levels are way reduced using this setting.

Minolta's software produces a magenta cast at least with my scanner. As well it does not support the mult-pass scanning that I get with Vuescan.

Jonathan Ratzlaff , December 01, 2002; 03:21 P.M. Eastern

----

Hi Jonathan,

I'd scanned with device|image and color|neutral before using color|log dark, and was getting strange yellow artifacts on highlights. The only way I could find to minimize theses was to go to slide film types. I prefer image and have been using it with black and white negatives. I was very sceptical regarding your suggestions, but on trying image with gamma was pleasantly suprised to see a result close to my minolta "benchmark" AND the physical slide. The minolta scan was getting a little more shadow detail on my test slide, so I tried bumping brightness to 1.1 and this shifted histogram enough to leave me a little bit of toe on both ends. In Photoshop, I clipped .02% off both ends with "find dark and light colors" setting (autocolor). At this point it was a bit spiky, but saving as 8 bit completely smoothed it. I would normally do this after all clean up was done, but in this case wanted to see the result, which was very nicely balanced and crisp, comparing to physical slide. Histogram looked like cross section of hawaii, and gets all the way to the base at both ends.

I have a very vague understanding of Vuescans gamma|log dark|etc. settings. Is the "curve" of gamma different than that of "log dark"? I believe Ed Hamrick alludes to that in his help pages. In other words, if I have gamma set and increase brightness, versus having log dark set and decreasing brightness, are they going to meet in the middle or is there an inherent difference between them.

Many thanks for your suggestions!

****

Helga, Christian, and Mendel,

Thanks for your responses. You have been very helpful.

I would follow this strategy:

http://www.photographical.net/scanner_profiling2_2.html

I did it to my scanner, with Kodak Q60 target and now I have it calibrated for two prefixed exposure setups (1.2 and 1.8 in vuescan) and I`m pretty pleased now with consistency of scans - colors are pretty realistic and have no more unpredictable casts of shifts.

Yes, naturally, entire color section in Vuescan should be disabled - set it to 'none'. All the rest is pretty obvious.

Actually, the reason why one may need to do calibration for specific exposure is quite simple - we will see non-linear color shifts on different exposure settings, so, the first step would be to stop all the artificial Vuescan`s activity like color restorations and whatever, so, we have an Image mode, have the exposure presetted to some specific value one like most (I like 1.2 - it works pretty good for me - I`m able to see most of Kodak Q60 patches with this setting),

color section will be disabled.

Hope it helps.

As I said, I have just started with scanning, and I must say that

following the tip about disabling Vuescan's colour correction

helped greatly. I had problems with difficult colour casts, like

yellow in one part of the image and neutral or blue in another

part IN THE SAME TONAL RANGE, which means that it's

impossible to correct with curves. Setting the colour adjustment

to "none" resulted in a heavy blue cast, but so what -- it was

uniform, and the relationship between R, G and B was

reasonably managable. So the lesson is: do not pick the scan

setting that looks the best in the preview, but which is the most

easy to fix in the image editor. Use the cursor on the preview and

read the numbers in the densitometer -- follow the numbers, not

the immediate visual impression.