Film scanners

I just bought a new to me Nikon LS-30 Coolscan III. So far I've been pretty impressed with the results. Naturally with anything new there is a learning curve.

So what I am looking for are your helpful hints. Things that you have learned the hard way so to speak that will help me get the best results I can.

I have been playing with curves and such and finding out what they do. The Nikon software is nice, but I find Vuescan does a nicer job of correcting the color right off. The only drawback I can see with Vuescan is the lack of thumbnails for a film strip. Maybe I'm missing something. I will play with it somemore before I buy it tho as this is an important feature for me.

While you can't control the way these threads seem to mutate, I hope this discussion doesn't revolve around which scanner is best etc.

Just looking for scanning tips that will work with my scanner, or film scanning in general.

Thanks in advance,

Eric

Eric,

I just finished up scanning 1300 of my wedding negatives on a LS4000ed. I bought the Vuescan license, and ended up not using it because of the reason you stated, along with the less than ideal user interface. I went to Nikon UK's website and downloaded the new nikonscan software that comes with the latest scanners (LS5000) and not only did it work with my scanner, but it does a hell of a better job batch scanning.

There are some general tips available at www.scantips.com might be a good starting point if you haven't already gone there.

I've looked at the scantips site. Not bad, but I'm a little bit beyond that.

Also have you looked at SilverFast software? Seems to get some good reviews.

Silverfast came packaged with the Epson 3200, tried it and it was crap. Don't know how it is with the Nikon, they might have gotten thier ducks in a row there for all I know.

When I had a Minolta scanner, I personally didn't find that third party software (Vuescan) gave me better scans than Minolta's software driver. I think the software you use to edit the scans has a lot more to do with the overall scanning experience. If it were me, I wouldn't do any editing or adjustment at all in the scanning software. Just use it to get the negative or slide scanned. Scan from inside your image editor and do any adjustments in there (or open the files in it afterwards). I like Picture Window Pro 3.5, myself. It's incredibly powerful, and it has full 48-bit file functionality. Scan in 48-bit mode (the files are much larger, but you are much less likely to lose any quality during the editing. Leave sharpening (which you really have to do) until last, and if you save, say, a screen-sized copy of the photo for web display or something, sharpening it again a little after you've saved it, using unsharp mask. If you are scanning B&W, scan it as colour, and then you can easily use the colour adjustments for each colour channel selectively. Don't just desaturate or convert to greyscale.

Actually, to get a porper film scan, you will need to adjust the white and black points in levels in order to compress the dynamic range / get a good exposure. You would't go out shooting and forget about metering, would you? It's sort of the same thing. You can get ok scans buy scanning in all auto mode, but it is just like a camera. I doubt many of us shoot in program mode... Just my $0.02

Slightly OT:

Anyone owns/know of a defective/out of use Olympus ES-10?


Jorge O