I have a number of boxes about the house and loft and garage full of envelopes returned from film labs, over the past... 50+ years. I have a medium term project to transfer all of these old negatives into the folders I've been using in recent years. Just yesterday I was going through a box from 2013; there were a dozen or so where the negatives were already in sheets that could be filed (the rest will have to be re-sleeved). While labelling these easy ones, I found a sheet with a roll of Provia 400X, taken on the Llandudno meet (was that really 7 years ago?). I remembered the roll, as it's the only roll of Provia 400X I've shot, and remembered it as a film much past its best. I had a look in my archive and yes, very faded and rather greenish would be my assessment. Imagine my shock when I held the strips up to the light and saw what appear to be lovely, natural colours!
So this film deserves a re-scan, or at least the better frames do. I've had a lot of trouble scanning slide film, so I thought I should refresh my memory on some of the issues. I've recently found my IT.8 target after it had hidden itself away for a few years, so I'll definitely re-profile the scanner.
Has anyone seen any good guides to scanning slide film (specially using Vuescan)? I'm minded to ask prompted by the video in the posts above, showing a whole new workflow for scanning. I've not been able to find anything comparable. I did find a video from a guy called Chis Crawford, but it's mostly the stuff I already know. He skips over profiling without mentioning its significance, so that's a mark against, too. I did get one interesting suggestion from it: set the white point to zero (default is 1)... not a very clear reason why, and he illustrates it by showing problems when its set to 4! There's also a description of batch scanning on his Nikon scanner, which might be useful hints when I want to try batch scanning on the V500. Anyway, the video is here:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pfYw1DzHJY
However, I'm looking at something more specifically about the slides. For example, I'm wondering about tackling the dynamic range of transparencies (specially deep shadows) by locking the exposure, and then using the exposure controls that appear to make multiple scans giving a wider exposure range than the standard Vuescan multi-exposure does, then subsequently combining them in PP...