Scanning underexposed slides

[benjamin_kim]

<p>Hi,<br>

I recently shot a roll of velvia 100 on 35mm and several of the slides were underexposed. I have an Epson V700 which I use to scan the slides and am having difficulty working with the underexposed ones. I tried correcting the exposure with photoshop but that hasn't turned out too well. Does anyone have any techniques on how to work with underexposed slides on a flatbed scanner? Thanks for your help and advice.<br>

Ben</p>

[david_manning1]

<p>Ben,</p>

<p>Underexposed Velvia is probably the hardest to fix. It's a very "dark" black, as you know.</p>

<p>I think the Coolscans have an advantage here with the ability to multi-scan (multi-pass) without adding noise to see further into the dark areas. </p>

<p>I have an Epson 4990 and have experienced the problem you're having. Unfortunately I gave up on saving those particular slides. However, I think if you scanned the slide in 16-bit mode a couple of individual times, scanning for under- and over-exposure, you might have better luck using HDR techniques in Photoshop to combine the best data from all the separate scans.</p>

<p>Please let us know if you try this and how it works for you. My underexposed slides weren't good-enough to warrant the work, but I'd be interested to know how it works.</p>

<p>Dave.</p>

[evan_goulet]

<p>I have yet to find a good way to deal with this issue. The last time I had some underexposed slide film (Kodak), I found a lot of noise in the shadows when scanning. I first adjusted the levels and curves in Epson Scan, and then did more adjustments in Photoshop. I was never happy with how they turned out.</p>

[sattler123]

<p>I don't think you will have any luck scanning those slides. Under-exposed slides are almost impossible to scan - all you'll get is noise if you try to get some light into those shadows. Even with My Nikon 9000 scanner and multi sampling I have found it useless. You might have better luck trying to print them the traditional way in a darkroom or send them to a lab.</p>

[roger_smith4]

<p>I do what David does- scan at two exposures and blend in post. It can't work miracles though. In the future, ditch Velvia and go with a lower contrast film like Astia or Sensia.</p>

[pankaj purohit]

<p>Vuescan may fix a little better than epson software, I faced some underexposure problems earlier (Negative films) and my canon software wasn't enough here, so I tried the Vuescan and its really superb in color reproduction.</p>

[david_henderson]

<p>I wouldn't bother with analogue printing- there's scarcely any to be found and the only process available (infrequently) is Cibachrome which doesn't find extreme highlights and shadows much fun either. So you'll likely end up with poor and expensive prints</p>

<p>I don't think there's a great answer either but the thing to avoid is making scans without any detail for then it doesn't matter what you do in PS, there's nothing there to improve. So your only option really is to keep running previews with different histogram adjustment/tone correction in Epson scan until the preview/histogram looks as good as you can get it. </p>