Scanning Color Negatives With Vuescan

But the other issue is that scanning a color negative is a highly subjective undertaking and no two operators will make the same decisions.

Scanning color negatives with vuescan.

Negative lab pro and vuescan. My old high end drum scanner hell s3900 is a fantastic piece of equipment but the software is totally unsuited to scanning color negatives. This is because film scanners are made for the wide density range of a color transparency. A 16 bit scan can take more curves and levels adjustments without losing quality than you can do with an 8 bit file.

File sizes are bigger. This allows scanning more than one image at a time. Since bw negatives scan in flat you need this ability. Obviously we don t want this or any other behind the scenes adjustments so the first thing to do is set vuescan s media type to image same as we.

To do so he takes four color negatives from four different types. See my vuescan batch scanning tutorial for directions. With this tool you can reduce or even eliminate a color negative s orange mask at the time of scanning. Choosing color negative will make vuescan do terrible things to your pictures based on profiles it has for various types of film.

It is worth it batch scanning. In this video kyle mcdougall does a pretty rigorous comparison of two types of scanning software. Left is the one with my basic setup ipad d810 tripod and the right one is my current setup elinchrom elb. Everything was working just fine.

There are exceptions such as vuescan or silverfast of course. Below is another scan of the same negative as before again using only my d810. Negatives bw or color have a lower density range and are lower in contrast than transparencies are. Scanning color negative film.

With negatives it s much the same. I do have a purchased copy of the software. Color negative film is able to capture a much wider range of intensities than slide film and this can create a problem when scanning negative film. The green channel usually is more than 1 exposure value ev darker and the blue channel is 1 ev darker still.

I placed a new negative exactly like the previous one and tried previewing. Slide film maps a density range of 0 2 7 to an intensity range of 1 500 but negative film maps a smaller density range of 0 2 4 to a larger intensity range of 1 4000. The scanner shut itself down. Screenshot of vuescan with a prescan of a slide in progress.

In a typical color negative scan the red color channel is brightest.