VueScan and LomoChrome Metropolis

I just stumbled on some old negatives and was wondering if anyone here could help me with scanning Metropolis. I tried asking about this on the analog subreddits about half a year ago but never got any responses.

I'm using an old CanoScan FS4000US with no way of using it on modern operating systems except for VueScan which I bought a couple of years ago. It works great for black-and-white as well as traditional colour films. Unfortunately, I've been unable to get a single good scan out of LomoChrome Purple and now LomoChrome Metropolis. The unusual base colour of the films seems to break everything down with VueScan's automatic colour balancing.

For my last try, I first scanned an empty strip of the film to get the base colour right, locked the exposure and the film base colour in VueScan, and then scanned the negatives as "Slide Film" (to prevent the automatic inversion VueScan normally does for negatives). I also tried locking the exposure and using "Image" as the type but that gave me pretty much the same results.

The Metropolis negatives themselves are rather dark and purplish (I thought they were supposed to be yellow-green?) but the images are well defined when looking against the light. However even after running an inversion with Negadoctor and some auto-balancing procedures in Darktable the colours still look quite off to me and some of the pictures are plain cyan-tinted even with the adjustments. I have no interest in manually tweaking the channels for each picture, so I'm looking for a way to get decent automatic scans.

Some examples of this last attempt in this album. Has anybody succeeded in scanning Lomo films with VueScan and could share their workflow? Or is there something else clearly wrong here? I can provide a sample TIFF of a negative if needed.

Isn’t the whole point of most Lomo color film to produce unusual color rendering? How will you know when you get the right “wrong” colors?

runswithsizzers said:

Isn’t the whole point of most Lomo color film to produce unusual color rendering? How will you know when you get the right “wrong” colors?

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Considering that Metropolis is supposed to produce desaturated but otherwise normal colors, I'm fairly sure that these heavily yellow-cast images are wrong. Similarly, with Purple I wasn't able to get anything resembling anything purplish - just a really thick cyan overcast that looked more like Lomo Turquoise than Purple.

Your Metropolis negatives don't look like either the 2019 or the 2021 version of Metropolis that I've shot and developed. Mine have more yellow-green base (the 2021 version having a bit denser base). Since your scans also show streaks/unevenness it could be that there was a problem with development.

Otherwise, I have no problem getting scans of Metropolis from Canon FS4000US and Vuescan in either mode (scanning as slide film and inverting by hand or scanning as negative film) or darkroom prints, but it is what it is, don't expect Portra or Ektar.

brbo said:

Your Metropolis negatives don't look like either the 2019 or the 2021 version of Metropolis that I've shot and developed. Mine have more yellow-green base (the 2021 version having a bit denser base). Since your scans also show streaks/unevenness it could be that there was a problem with development.

Otherwise, I have no problem getting scans of Metropolis from Canon FS4000US and Vuescan in either mode (scanning as slide film and inverting by hand or scanning as negative film) or darkroom prints, but it is what it is, don't expect Portra or Ektar.

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Thanks for sharing this! I'm leaning towards development/production issues as well. The base color is definitely weird and I wonder if it can even be caused by failed development alone. According to my notes I did nothing weird while developing it. I was using a Tetenal C41 kit and the previous and the next roll (Fuji C200 and Silberra 100) were done the same way and look okay. I think I need to sacrifice another roll and this time send it to a lab, get their scans and then scan it myself to see if it was an issue with that specific roll or kit.

Have you ever scanned LomoChrome Purple?

Zackyist said:

Have you ever scanned LomoChrome Purple?

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I have. I make a quick "index scan" of every roll I shot and then make RA-4 prints of frames that I like enough. I don't fuss about colours at those scans.

I have FS4000US that I don't use since I have other nicer scanners, but I now made one scan of LomoChrome Purple (shot at 400) on FS4000US with Vuescan. I don't see this combination being a problem/limitation at scanning Metropolis or Purple.

Well your pics definitely have the Purple vibe going, nice! For Vuescan's color settings, did you just use auto-levels?

I took a look at the previous rolls I had scanned and also did a new Purple roll. It appears that the fault has been in using Vuescan's maximum crop (which includes parts of the film holder and messes up something with the scanner - maybe the dynamic range - so that auto-levels in editing are off even after cropping the picture) as well as the Negadoctor module in Darktable. I scanned an image with the film holder parts cropped off in Vuescan as a negative with Vuescan's auto-levels and then the same frame as a slide film, inverting it with Negadoctor. Even after applying auto-levels and white balancing for the snow, the colors are weird in the inverted picture - it seems like Darktable inverts this kind of base color differently. I tried inverting the same "slide" in GIMP and it was just fine, looking almost exactly like the auto-leveled negative from Vuescan.

Here's the one handled by Vuescan:



And here's the one by Darktable:


As for the previous rolls, it seems like the ones I had tried to edit earlier were actually just severely underexposed (and scanned with the film holder parts in the picture) which is why Vuescan didn't handle the colors well. I guess I need to do another scan run and see if it will help and also try to scan Metropolis that way again.