Last night I did the best scanning of color negatives I've ever done. I tried a lot so far but always with mixed results. What I did: Nikon 5000ED with Vuescan. I used the "advanced workflow" described on the Vuescan website but the trick was to save the raw file with film base as 64bit tif. This gives a positive tif file, so it is not exactly raw, and it looks horrible. I then open this "raw tif" in Photoshop Elements and apply "Auto Levels". That's it. Before "auto levels" I could apply vignetting correction via lens correction as an optional step.
The result was really stunning. Nothing I could get with Nikon Scan or Vuescan proper. I'll have to further experiment how sensitive this method is to Vuecan settings. Before I tried all sorts of Vuescan settings to get something sensible out of it and while I did it was still miles behind from this simple Photoshop method. And Vuescan in batch mode is much faster than Nikon Scan but Nikon Scan is more accurate in finding the frames.
The result was really stunning. Nothing I could get with Nikon Scan or Vuescan proper. I'll have to further experiment how sensitive this method is to Vuecan settings. Before I tried all sorts of Vuescan settings to get something sensible out of it and while I did it was still miles behind from this simple Photoshop method. And Vuescan in batch mode is much faster than Nikon Scan but Nikon Scan is more accurate in finding the frames.