Taking control of scanning software

[Marco Andrés]

Some people complain that the scanning software is opaque, makes too many automatic adjustments and is far too difficult to use [Vuescan is particularly problematic]. And software is expensive. The scanning software I've used [Vuescan, SilverFast] suffer from feature bloat [too many features with little payoff, also see PhotoShop ]. Although Epson offers free downloads of SilverFast which I tested, I chose Epson Scan 2. On Mac OSX, Image Capture is also a good choice.

Consider using scanning software as little as possible and doing the post-processing in Photoshop/Gimp/… You'll manipulate the image with that software anyway.

Scan negatives as positives without making any changes [a pure scan]. Epson Scan 2 supports this approach.

• Include a portion of the film base to remove the colour cast later.
• When scanned, colour negatives will look orange [film base] while black-white negatives will be grey [film base]. After inverting the image, subtract the inverted film base.
• Manipulate the brown-tinted image.

Hints

• Before inverting I've manipulated negatives in Gimp using Levels -> Auto Input Levels [or carefully setting the R, G, B curves as well as the composite curve].
• You can save the curves as presets to process other images [In Gimp, save the relevant presets are in Colors -≥ Levels… and Colors -> Curves]. You'll need presets for each film as well as for pushing [-1, -2] and pulling [+1, +2].

Complete details

• Alex Burke Manual Inversion of Color Negative film

https://www.alexburkephoto.com/blog/2019/10/16/manual-inversion-of-color-negative-film

• Although Burke uses Gimp, it is easy to modify his process to use Photoshop

Alex Burke also describes how to manipulate colour negatives to extract maximum detail, using the [old version of the Epson scanning software for some processing and then Gimp for the rest.

• https://www.alexburkephoto.com/blog/2013/06/02/scanning-and-editing-color-negative-film

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

It's easier to scan chromes.