Scanning MF negatives with V500, Vuescan, and Colorperfect

Hi all:

I'm struggling to get good consistent scans from MF negatives... here's a recent attempt that's especially disappointing:



This is on Ektar 100 shot with an old Rolleicord TLR, scanned with an Epson V500 using Vuescan and Colorperfect, following the procedure described here. The results are awful: murky foreground, streaky magenta sky, weird overall color cast. Gives the pictures a nice distressed, dystopian feel -- if only that was I was going for!

Every now and then one of my pictures will turn out great, but most of them look more like this. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong? There are so many variables that it's hard to know where to start.

-- Rob

Why don't you try Epson scan that came with the V500? I use the Epson scan program on my Epson V600. I've scanned a lot of different negative and positive 35mm and 6x7 MF 120 films that you can see on my flickr site -click below.


As an aside, I prefer chromes like Velvia 50 over color negatives like Ektar 100. I find I get the blues too with Ektar 100. But you can adjust the Hue slider to get that out in post. In general I prefer chromes. These can be adjusted easier and I like seeing which is the best picture just looking at the film. You can't do that with negatives although I often get a contact sheet when I have it developed.

As an aside, Kodak Portra negative film scans pretty good. But the colors are too neutral for my preference.

Is the calibration gap at the top of the holder always unobstructed/uncovered and is the glass bed area under the calibration gap absolutely spotless and clear of any dust/haze/etc.? Poor start-up calibration can sometimes cause streaking. The fact that colors are also off would make me start troubleshooting by looking at calibration issues. It could be a number of things though.

As Alan suggested, what happens when you use EpsonScan software? That is a good diagnostic step.

Doug

Great images, Alan! That's the kind of stuff that keeps my trying at this! And I should have mentioned, I'm using Doug's negative holder with ANR glass.

So here's one from another roll, scanned with the Epson software and not adjusted at all (the only post-processing was shrinking and jpeg-ing it in photoshop).



Same ugly vertical stripes,general murky appearance.

The outer surface of the glass is spotless, but I notice that there seems to be an uneven spotty haze on the inside of the glass. I think I'll explore cleaning that...

Woohoo! I cleaned the glass following the instructions here, and that seems to have cured the problem:



No more stripes!

That's a great shot. Colors, focus, sharpness, contrast all look great. Glad you fixed the problem.