Best from vuescan....?

[pankaj purohit]

Hi,

 

I now started using Vuescan as my scanning software for my canon 8800f scanner which I use for my 35mm

negative film work. I have tried so many combinations of scanning settings in vuescan.

 

So far I reaced on the conclusion that sharpen option should not be enabled in Vuescan or any other software,

sharpening should be made in the software.

 

But I am still unable to get best results from Vuescan as I still not reached on some globle setting combo to get best

sharp, true color and full data from my negatives.

 

One more thing with vuescan I found that it doesn't scan at 4800dpi and only scans at 2400 dpi on my canon 8800f.

If you know some settings from your experience to get all the data and sharp results from negatives, please share

with me.

 

Thanks...

[ronald_moravec1]

When scanning, I try to get proper density ( centered histogram for most negs unless they are high or low key), and correct color balance and properly focused. They will look flat with dull colors as this point.

 

Any other changes are better taken care of in photoshop. Trying to do so with scanning software slows scanning down and you loose options later in PS.

 

Import the scan to ps, and do auto levels as a first step. Then do a curves to adjust minor color bal and curve shape and contrast, and the color saturation. Then any "creative work" such as burn/dodge.

[mendel_leisk]

"So far I reaced on the conclusion that sharpen option should not be enabled in Vuescan or any other software,

sharpening should be made in the software."

 

There's some circular logic in the above ;)

 

Look into Vuescan's Scan-From-Disk workflow. You intitially save what Vuescan describes as a "Raw File", a 16 bit

red/green/blue gamma 1.0 tiff file with no histogram adjustments or sharpening. It purportedly is the unaltered

information, just as it came from the scanner. Subsequently, you Scan-from-Disk (pseudo-scan) using this file

instead of doing any further physical scanning.

 

You are free to switch Vuescan's sharpening on/off, try different Color Tab adjustments, etc., without altering your

original "Raw File". Very similar concept to using DSLR raw files.

 

I found it most practical to set the "at save" option on the output Tab when saving raw files, which incorporates

rotation and cleaning, It also *can* incorporate sharpening, but that is best left off at this stage. Also, I usually leave

crop at maximum.

 

One Vuescan bug: you should leave any-and-all ICC profile settings at "built-in". Vuescan claims any ICC profiles set

are not applied to Raw Files saved "at save", but last time I checked they were. This changes the color balance of

your raw file and can result in double application of the profile. Best avoided.

 

I then open the raw file in Photoshop, do any remedial cleaning, carefully crop the file and re-save. Since the file is

gamma 1.0 it's appearance is quite dark, making it difficult to clean the darker areas. There is a work-around for this,

by setting up a gamma 1.0 proof mode. If you're interested I

can post info on how to set this up.

 

For film with a lot of scratches and dirts, primarily my older slide collection, I was not satisfied with Vuescan's

alternative to my scanner's ICE. Fortunately, my scanner offered "16 bit linear" output, which appears nearly identical

to Vuescan's "raw file". So I would make my initial scans through my scanner's software, with ICE, then take it over

to Vuescan for scan-from-disk.

 

Here's Ed Hamrick's explanation in the help file:

 

http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc14.htm#topic11

[pankaj purohit]

Thanks Mendel for that educative explanation of your experience.

 

I would like to hear some more thoughts....

[marc_bergman1]

The late Bruce Fraser wrote some great material on sharpening.

<p>

<a href="http://www.creativepro.com/article/out-of-gamut-thoughts-on-a-sharpening-workflow">Article on sharpening.</a>

<p>

Flatbed scans need a great deal of sharpening. I like the idea of a 3 step approach.

<p>

Contact Ed Hamrick about Vuescan not scanning at 4800dpi on your scanner. I am sure he can make a change to the software. I have noticed on my Epson 4490 that 4800 dpi can make a difference.

[jtk]

1) The software won't increase the detail resolution of a scanner...detail resolution is limited by the scanner's optical/mechanical design. Sharpening doesn't increase detail resolution, it just invents edges.

 

2) Be happy with the detail resolution of your Canon. It doesn't come close to the detail resolution of the last several generations of Nikon or the old Minoltas, but it probably beats all but the most recent top Epsons.

 

3) If Canon's 2400ppi is the same as Nikon's 2400ppi it will work wonderfully well with 120 and reasonably well with 35mm, but it won't rival Nikon's 2400ppi because the optical system isn't as good. Think of it this way: Kodachrome is capable of equal detail resolution in a Leica and in a Holga, but somehow the resulting image is more detailed with one of them :-)

 

4) Use Canon's default settings. Keep it simple. Do your corrections and sharpening in post processing. Don't

try to produce a finished-looking image directly from the scan, the process isn't intended for that.

 

5) Canon's dust reduction doesn't rival Ice or Vuescan's infared, and it isn't capable of using Vuescan's infared. Vuescan's infared in recent Nikons seems identical to Ice4, the Nikon version of Ice, but its performance is reduced in machines that were only capable of earlier versions, such as Minolta 5400II and Nikon IV. Vuescan works well in various machines, but it is limited by their designs. Ice4 uses a dedicated forth light (that's the "4" in the name) that wasn't provided in earlier Nikons or in Minoltas.

[pankaj purohit]

Thanks friends for your thughts.

 

Ok, Now I got some points to mind makup in my workflow.

 

John, as have tried so much imesmy Canon, it works resonably well with dust and scratch cleanig while keeping the low time cost, so cleaning was never the isuue.

 

Marc, you provided a very valuable link for sharpning echniques, thanks for that and thanks to late Bruce Fraser for this nice writeup. Its very valuable for many of us.

 

And Mark, I mailed Mr. Hamrick for my problem and he assured me to fix this bug while Canon 8800f has its optical resolution to 4800dpi.

 

All we know that tonal adjustments should be made later in softwares like Photoshop, but I would be interested to know about the multi pass, multi exposure and similar things to improove the quality of scanning.

 

How these hings affect and how we should use...?

[allen_gross]

What is Vuescan's "infrared" what does it actually do, and how do I access it? I have read about it in previous posts, but I have looked through the user's guide and menus to no avail. (PS I have a Minolta Scan Dual III- maybe it can't use this feature?)

 

Thanks for info on this.

[mendel_leisk]

"I have a Minolta Scan Dual III- maybe it can't use this feature?"

 

That's correct. Vuescan can only do cleaning if your scanner has the infrared detection of dust and scratches. With

my Scan Elite 5400 (which does have ICE), Vuescan cleaning is ok with fairly clean film, but for badly scratched or

dusty film, it's a distant second to Minolta Scan Utility with ICE and the Grain Dissolver.

[pankaj purohit]

I get great results when scanning at 4800 DPI but problem is that I can not scan at 4800dpi wiith infrared cleacning

on in Vuescan. Vuescan only scan at 2400 dpi with infrared cleaning on. Is there any solution to get scanned at

4800dpi and clean at 2400dpi....Hmmm ..! something like solution...!

[mendel_leisk]

You could use your scanner's supplied software and FARE to scan and clean at 4800 DPI. And Ed Hamrick is likely working on a fix for the 2400 DPI limit with Vuescan+Cleaning.

 

Something you might try:

 

Leave cleaning off, do test scans at 2400 and 4800 DPI's. Upsample the 2400 DPI scans to match the 4800 DPI scan, and carefully compare fine detail, at 100% display resolution in Photoshop. Are you actually extracting any more detail, or just creating larger files with the higher resolution scan?

 

Flatbeds tend to have diminishing returns at the higher resolution. Actually, any scan over 4000 DPI, even with a dedicated film scanner, can be overkill, unless your film is very fine grain.

[pankaj purohit]

Yes Mendel, I find distinguishable difference in both scans, 4800dpi is better and when I scan in vuescan wiht 4800dpi, it brings out little more details and image is more noiseless than 2400 dpi. Offcourse we can say that flatbeds 4800 dpi means real 2400 dpi, so for a decent 2400dpi output, we should scan at 4800 dpi and resize this to 2400dpi. This is what I found so far with my experience, and this downsized 2400dpi is sufficient for my maximum needs.

 

Bit I think there is some more options to get little more sharp result while using vuescan, but I don't know how to make combo of these options...?

 

I mean some options like MULTI PASSING, MULTI EXPOSURE....etc. I tried these options at diffrerent combinations like 2x,3x, 4x, 10x. But I couldnt got right combination yet, or may be that I am going on some wrong ways...?

[pankaj purohit]

Can anyoene suggest me some workflow suggestions to use Vuescan in write direction to get best sharp results right through scanner...?

[sandip_bhattacharya]

I can confirm that 8800f + vuescan IR doesn't work for me either. I too have to scan only at 2400 DPI to get IR done. I would also prefer scanning at 4800dpi and then using the raw downsampling to actually store it at 2400 DPI.

 

I use an Ubuntu linux system as a primary workstation, and so have to get the scans done on a windows machine as vuescan only support 8800f on windows(thanks to @#% canon). While I like photoshop elements, I would prefer to edit images on my primary machine using Gimp. So the workflow I am planning is - scan the 35mm color negatives in raw + IR clean, copy them to linux and use vuescan there to scan, cut them up and edit them. As you can make out, I am not a professional and so i find the 2400 dpi raw scans of my film strips adequate for archiving. I would love to hear image backup policies used by other though as image archiving very quickly gets out of hand. I use digikam to manage photos which has at least all the features i essentially need.

[sandip_bhattacharya]

As others said, while it is convenient to get image adjustments done by vuescan, it is often better to use the best tools for the job. If photoshop can do a better job for sharpening, it is better to do batch processing of your photos done through it rather than vuescan.

 

Output tiffs from vuescan (not raw tiffs, i mean regular tiffs), batch process them in photoshop and output jpegs when you are done(delete these individual tiffs if you have the raw scan of the whole strip).

 

Another thing that i have seen in my brief experience - to get the best images out of your photod, you need to spend time on each of them. So I follow Ed Hamricks and other's tip - keep the raw scans of the film strip but process only the photos that you can make out is worth the effort. Spend time on each of them - just the the lab folks, you need to tweak exposure, color balance separately on blocks of photos taken at the same time. Every block of photos which are taken in different lighting situation needs a separate color correction (for film) which, if you try to instruct vuescan to uniformly do for all the photos in the roll, might not give you the best out of your photos.

[geoff_shapiro]

I have just bought an 8800f for scanning in 40-50 year old medium format negatives and for some 30 year old or so 35mm slides and negatives. Like you, I have also found that it will not save scans done at 4800 dpi with Vuescan when the cleaning function is enabled. Because the film is so old, there are many scratches and defects so I cannot even think of scanning without the cleaning capability. For archival purposes 2400 dpi, which does work, does not seem high enough resolution, especially for the 35mm format.

 

On the plus side - the cleaning function observed at 2400 dpi is nothing short of astounding for the 35mm negatives. The film is in such bad shape and they come out almost clean looking with Vuescan. The scanner's included software, for some odd reason on my system, seems to not do any dust and scratch removal at all regardless of how aggressive I set the setting for it to.

 

The behavior of Vuescan when it fails at 4800 dpi with cleaning enabled, is that the second pass scan never occurs and after this no output is saved to disk and Vuescan itself appears to be unstable (additional attempts to preview and/or scan fail, other functions don't behave as they should, etc). As a software developer, if my own code were behaving in such a manner I'd be quite suspicious of memory allocation problems, failure to detect out-of-memory conditions but allowing logic flow to continue on in the code despite the failure, etc.

 

Before I file a problem report with Ed Hamrick, may I ask what is the most recent word you've had from him about the problem? It does sound like he acknowledged the problem so perhaps there is a fix forthcoming soon...