vuescan making my color negs bluish tint

<p>I've been developing my first color negative film with tetenal c41 - a kodak ektar. so I've scanned it with vuescan and epson v600 and they came out very bluish tinter. theres so much sliders and possibilities in vuescan that i don't know the best settings.Please see uploaded pictures. then i just scanned with the epson software with no settings - not even unsharp mask and i think it came out ok - see also picture. I don't even know how kodak ektar is supposed to look :(. i want to use vuescan but i don't know best settings - do some of you? maybe silver fast is better - i don't know. thanks in advance</p>

<p>I gave up on vuescan for color neg film. In my experience it was totally useless. And with Ektar film specifically, it just gets maddening because of high contrast of the film. Even after locking exposure, base color, etc the vuescan still tries to guess exposure and balance for each frame and usually it royally screws it up. I could only find two ways to make it work with color neg film:<br>

1. run in raw mode and do inversion in an external program<br>

2. shoot a gray card on one frame of the film roll and use that to calibrate vuescan and lock all exposures/color balance. This works most of the time, but not always.<br>

Anyway, for B/W work I love vuescan, but for color, I switched back to EPSONscan. It's not perfect, but results are at least useful. And if I see a frame that deserves extra work, I can rescan it raw and invert/color-balance manually.</p>

 

<p>I don't have Vuescan. I use Epson scan with my V600 and it usually comes out fine. </p>

<p>Here's some old Ektar 25 in 120 Medium Format. I don't have any Ektar 100.<br>

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/ektar/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/ektar/</a></p>

<p>You may have had Auto color corrections settings in Configurations set even though you think you didn't have anything set when you scanned in Epson. It's a little hidden. I also can scan totally flat and use ELements afterwards and get similar results.</p>

<p>I couldn't find the link to your pictures. Could you post it?</p>

<p>ok heres the images</p><div></div>

<p>and vuescan</p><div></div>

<p>well ill skip vuescan and turn back to epson. i too think its useless. can't understand all those positive reviews on that software. ALLAN - can you tell with settings step by step you use for scanning color negatives on epson v600 using epsons own software? </p>

<p>I think VueScan is trying to "over correct" the orange film base, because its not one complete picture but several pictures surrounded by nothing but orange on the film strip. Its an average colour correction made by VueScan based on the film base and the pictures combined. If you want realistic colours, you need to scan the frames one by one. You can use a photo-editing program to correct the blue tint.</p>

<p>I bought VueScan Professional for a project (using an HP 4600 scanner to scan antique books), and for that it worked fine.<br>

Then I switched our primary machine from Windows XP to Mac OS 10.7. I have an Epson V750, which I bought over the V700 because I'd really liked SilverFast on the old Epson 2450. It came with SilverFast Ai 6. But that license doesn't work for the new "total rewrite" SilverFast 8 for Mac OS 10.7. So I tried to make VueScan work for color negative scanning. The highlight adjustment doesn't work right, you can't drag it higher than the <em>average</em> of the R, G, and B curves, so you can easily wind up clipping one or more of the colors. The preview window color balance looks nothing like the scan window color balance. I tried the "advanced method" for scanning C-41 (locking exposure and base), and that didn't help much. Support response has been frustrating. I gave up and decided life is too short to haggle with Ed to fix the bugs. So I bought SilverFast AI 8 for the V750. (I did get an upgrade price.)<br>

SilverFast, after they added the Ektar 100 film profile a few years ago, has done very well with Ektar for me. Although I got decent results with Nikon Scan on my Coolscan V. I can still use Nikon Scan under Parallels on Mac OS, but I probably will pony up the substantial extra money for SilverFast Ai 8 for the Coolscan to get IT8 profiles. (I scan a lot of old Kodachrome, and IT8 calibration makes that a lot easier.)<br>

I've had first-rate product support from SilverFast, even when I was just using versions bundled with scanners. They are honourable about support.<br>

The price of SilverFast LE Is not really that outrageous. I will admit that SilverFast Ai is quite expensive. I'm often scanning vintage materials with serious exposure problems, so I need 16-bit scans, so I will pay the extra for the Ai version. But if you're just scanning properly exposed C-41 negative materials, SilverFast LE (which is limited to 8-bit scans) should be perfectly sufficient.<br>

I'll also note that SilverFast 8 on Mac OS is <em>much more user friendly</em> than SilverFast 6.6. They have completely rethought the user interface. I think it's a big improvement.<br>

I do have my gripes with SilverFast. The NegaFix C-41 film profiles are not always great. They didn't do different versions for each generation of Portra 400NC. They still don't have profiles for the new Portra 160 and Portra 400. So there is a timeliness issue with NegaFix. The documentation is in Germlish, often difficult to understand.</p>

 

There are two ways to get good colour in vuescan. First is the lock exposure trick, second is to scan as raw and use

colorperfect. The lock exposure trick is in the vuescan manual under advanced workflow I believe.

I haven't tried the lock exposure trick, but I see that it was referenced (with a link) in a thread

from two weeks ago, by John Shriver: <a href="http://www.photo.net/film-and-processing-

forum/00an1z">http://www.photo.net/film-and-processing-forum/00an1z</a>

<p>so? i read the post john about color perfect but that dosent give me the right color negative colors - the specific single film look . then i might as well shoot digital.how do i get a realistic scan of different negative films like kodak ektar and portra then - get silver fast? i now upload two more images scanned with epson software with different settings. can anyone tell which gets closest to the ektar 100</p>

<p>so? i read the post john about color perfect but that dosent give me the right color negative colors - the specific single film look . then i might as well shoot digital.how do i get a realistic scan of different negative films like kodak ektar and portra then - get silver fast?what about this one. scanned with epson set to adobe rgb. little levels tweak in ps prophoto color space for contrast and nothing else. and converted to srgb for contrast and nothing else. is this close to ektar 100?</p><div></div>

<p>hmm still bluish right?</p>

<p>Jeppe: Frame only the picture to scan. Do not include the black borders. That may effect the results. I scan with Epson as follows: Click Configuration button at the bottom. Check Color Control. Check Continuous Auto Exposure. Set Display Gamma at 2.2. You may find that all these are already set by Epson. Everything else should <em>not</em> be set except ICE to get rid of spots but you can clean that up in post as well. ICE takes longer to scan.</p>

<p>Set bits at 48 color and resolution at 2400.</p>

<p>That's what I do. You'll have to adjust in post some but you'll be pretty close. I tend to work with Levels first.</p>

<p>Edited gamma to 2.2</p>

<p>Edited gamma to 2.2 Alan</p>

<p>You have to learn to use any tool. VueScan is one of the best tools around, but the manual is admittedly a little difficult.</p>

<p>All the same, I use VueScan all the time for slides from Kodachrome to GAF 500. I also use it for Kodak, Fuji, and even old Agfacolor color negative films with many different base colors. Even Ektar.<br>

No problems at all. <br>

Probably the control you're looking for is on the Color tab (surprise!). While there are many different settings, try "white balance" for a start and work from there.</p>

<p>I can't speak to the Epson scanner nor how you are using it, but I have used Vuescan with everything from old Hewlett-Packard Scanjets to dedicated film scanners and Canoscan flatbed film scanners. It works better than the factory supplied programs ever did, and VueScan keeps updating it even for the oldest machines.</p>

<p>I suppose some of you once picked up a violin, tried to play it, and then threw it away as "useless" because you couldn't get smooth notes out of it right away?</p>

<p> </p>

<p>As Alan said, scan in just the images, not the film edges and things will probably improve right off the bat.<br /> Here's your image with the center one simply corrected with automatic color balance.</p>

<p>BTW, Ektar does have some known problems in the "blue" area. Sky-lit areas can come out pretty blue, but that's not the scan, but the film.</p><div></div>

<p>JDM: Nice edit. I never thought about auto white balance as I usually use auto levels first. What program are you using?</p>

Vuescan is good because it has a lot of adjustments. But it has a learning curve because it has a lot of adjustments.

Epson software will look better When you're starting out but if you get used to Vuescan and learn how to get good

color from it you won't want to go back.

<p>Can you show us some samples so we can judge for ourselves?</p>

<p>Here's a few of my settings that are color balance relevant. Note in particular the Crop|Buffer setting. If you want to scan the black frame surrounding the picture Vuescan could be considering that area when computing color balance.</p>

<p>Input|Media: Color negative<br />Input|Batch scan: List<br />Input Batch list: 1-4<br />Input|Auto focus: Scan<br />Input|Auto save: Scan<br />Crop|Crop size: Auto<br />Crop|Buffer: 15% (tells vuescan to ignore outer 15%, good if you're scanning frame)<br />Color|Color Balance: White Balance<br />Color|Black point: 0%<br />Color|White point: .5%<br />Color|Curve low: .25<br />Color|Curve high: .75<br />Color|Brightness: 1<br />Color|Negative vendor: Generic<br />Color|Negative brand: Color<br />Color|Negative type: Negative</p>

<p>I'd recommend outputting Vuescan Raw file first (RGB, 16 bit per channel). Retain that, then experiment with different settings, scanning from the file.</p>

<p>Actually, if you're scanning multiple frames as a single image you're going to have issues no matter what you set for buffer: consider altering your workflow to isolate frames?</p>

<p>Alan. I was using Photoshop CS5.5. I just used auto color on the center one. Inverted the selection and did levels with black for the film edge for the rest.</p>

<p>I wonder if it's the issue with Mac vs Windows versions of VueScan. I'm using mac, and just like John Shiver, the results with Vuescan are very unpredictable. Jeppe, are you running it on Mac or Windows?</p>

 

<p>Eugene: yes I'm running it on a iMac and i also get inconsistent results but i haven't got the time yet to use all your great answers and help about the different settings from this post but I'm going too tomorrow to see if anything changes.i hope to get better results because today I've been out shopping a canon AE1 program with some lenses very cheap and like new. BTW really sad to hear rumors about film producing companies closing all the time because when digital gets boring (and it does) we are left with this great way of doing photography. thanks</p>

<p>As Chris says that's one way. </p>

<p>I have Epson Scan and Vuescan (demo). I prefer to scan color negs with the Epson b/c the colors are just lovely. Great for quick scans, in auto and upload to facebook for example. You may find that the WB isn't perfect but v v usable for snapshots. </p>

<p>IMO, there is not much diff between Chris's method and the auto Epson, they are both the same hardware, diff scanning software. You could also accept whatever results you get off Epson or Vuescan and adjust them in LR or PS manually. Or maybe make a gentle edit and then copy/paste it to the rest of the roll. </p>

<p>I have a Coolscan 4000 as well which is Nikon Scan software. You have to adjust the settings too or again with Vuescan. For easy quick snaps, I just prefer to use my flatbed Epson scanner (Epson Scan) and when I want a better scan, I use the Coolscan and spend more time in post manually. </p>