Very well, I have all these old colour negatives that I would like to scan so that I can decide whether to process the images further or consign them to the bin. Have you any tips on what sort of settings to use to get the optimum scan results given that the scanner is a Nikon Coolscan IV and the software the professional version of VueScan, please?
I'm still using an old Acer Scanwit, I bought back in the millennium; results I'm getting now using Vuescan are enormously more impressive than I got with the box software, but it aint particularly fast.
Settings I use is max Dpi (I cant remember exactly, probably about the same as your coolscan, about 28oo ish, I think) delivers, about 2500x3600 pix for a full frame, just shy of 10Mpix.
I scan via twain direct into Photo-shop in PSD format, at 48bit colour depth; I select multi-pass set at 12 times* with multi-exposure 'on'.
I tend to leave scan exposure on ether auto or white balance; only if I have anything particularly awkward to try and 'recover' do I mess with the exposure centers or curves; and make any adjustments post-scan Photo-shop.I leave noise reduction & sharpening 'off', likewise 'restore colours'. And, again, do any touching, post in PS.
*12 over-scan makes scan time rather lengthy!!! I'ts probably a little over-kill. 3x over-scan is better than single pass by a good margin, 6x is probably more than good enough most of the time. Above that gains seem to start getting smaller, but saves re-scanning the ones that are a bit 'iffy' . 9x is probably about 'optimal' for quality/reliability, but 12x gives that little more confidence. At 6x I'm looking at 30 minutes a strip of 6, so setting it to batch and going to find something else to do whilst it does them, so difference stretching that to 45min or so makes little odds anyway!
The images produced appear to be very grainy and this grain becomes emphasised on conversion to black & white and especially on enlargement.
I have never really see 'film grain' in anything out of the scanner, the scanner resolution just isn't high enough. to actually start resolving halide crystal structure in the pixels. 'Noise' on the other hand is a different matter.
For 110 cartridge film, and a few TINY Minox sub-mini negs, I have used a slide duplicator lens on the electric picture maker to digitize them. Duplicator has limited 'zoom' enlargement as well as the 1.5x crop factor, that can quite 'nicely' get me a 'one shot' 24Mpix file from a 110 cartridge frame; Minox at max mag has to be cropped down a bit. Making such high scale enlargements to digital, I can start just about start seeing actual halide chrystal film grain rendered by the pixies with a bit of peeping.
This is a 'camera-scan' from 8x11mm Minox neg (sized down from original 20 ish Mpix). At full-frame, even though the frame area is barely 1/4 that of 35mm, film-grain isn't particularly obvious.
Here's a 1:1 pixel crop from original camera scan, something like 10x enlargement from original, and only now is the actual grain detail starting to show in the pixels! And even her a lot of the granularity is actually digital noise.
That's a 20+year old neg, BTW. Shows the quality that the little spy camera had in it's day, reasonably well I think! What I have taken from 110 negs on the other hand, has often been quite horrid! Probably the worst of the worse as far as the original film stock and processing, as well as exposure, in what was probably a key-ring camera of the lowest order in most cases! And again, youngest have got to be pushing 20 years old.
But the point is, you would need to be scanning at an un-interpolated 'true' resolution of around 10,00 dpi, four times or or that of most scanners, before you would be resolving actual real halide crystal 'grain' structure.
Perhaps I am expecting to be able to make selective enlargements like I would do with scans from slides and that is expecting too much.
As far as real 'grain' is concerned, it shouldn't be. As said, scanner resolution shouldn't be high enough to start resolving the halide crystals in the pixels, still. Main difference between slide and print film is in the chemistry.
In a Print film, the silver halide crystals are encouraged to oxidize and go black when light falls on them; development promotes that reaction so that where light falls you get more crystal growth and a dark area, and where little or no light falls, the crystals remain smaller or are washed away entirely to leave a light area. With a Slide film, mechanics are exactly the same until half way through development, when dye attaches iyself to where there ISN'T any halide crystals, before the crystals themselves are bleached away, to effect 'reversal' of the image, from negative to positive; So you don't see actual crystal structure in a slide, but the 'stain' where they were before they were bleached out. So you still should have the same degree of 'granularity', just 'reversed'
Only other significant difference is that C41 colour print film has a rather strong orange filter in the actual celluloid. This is to compensate for a rather high response to blue light in the print emulsion, that needs to be filtered out in printing to avoid a strong cast, and it's easiest to put that 'gross' filter on the film than have to try and dial it out on the enlarger. However, as any-one who has ever tried to make Black & White prints from C41 colour negatives can attest, it DOES rather effect the contrast in the print.
Which is all probably a lot of convoluted techno-babble, to say that I don't think you are seeing 'grain', but digital 'noise', which i possibly exacerbated by the lower contrast obtained from C41 colour negatives, due to the correction cast.
And possibly, that most old colour print film was usually of low grade to begin with, a roll given away 'free' when you got your prints back from the notable not very god postal developers.and was most often run through a relatively unsophisticated compact camera, many with a fixed aperture and shutter speed, relying entirely on the films exposure latitude and printing correction to get a decent image off it. When run through more sophisticated cameras some better control of metering was likely applied ether by camera or user, but with a far degree of exposure latitude and correction in printing, diligence applied was seldom to the same degree as any-one who shot slide film, where without the same degree of exposure latitude and no room for correction in printing, users were far usually more determined to get it 'clean in camera' and particularly to avoid blowing highlights.
I am expecting to be able to make selective enlargements
Picking up on that one, in my own experience, I haven't really noticed much of any huge difference in taking crops from a scanned neg to one taken from a scanned slide. Limit of digital enlargement in either case has been in the original scan resolution and the degree of enlargement before pixelisation.
Now, with a scanner resolution that delivers only around 10Mpix for a full frame image, the amount of sectional enlargement you can make from it before the display image is grossly pixlated at far more moderate levels of crop than when taken from the 24Mpix image my electric picture maker gives me. Hence, where I may wish to make a sectional enlargement, to get the biggest pixel count I can 'at source', and avoid 'digital zoom', I will usually make a Camera-Scan with the slide duplicator lens, and get as much enlargement of the section optically, and get that section in 24Mpix rather than something less than 7..
Which takes matters off on a tangent as to the best method for the task, and overall work-flow. As mentioned I have had the old Acer since Y2K, when I decided that early direct to digital electric picture makers were far too expensive for the resolution they offered, and notion of shooting E6 Slide and scanning, offered bets quality for least cost.... and MOST time... When home developing was soon shown to be a spit in the ocean compared to even just a single pass 1200Dpi scan on an old 233Mhz Pentium II PC with just 8Megs, yes MEGS of RAM! seriously, I would leave it scanning one strip over night!
Consequently, to tackle the back catalog, when I chanced on a 'cheap' web-cam type scanner in Maplins, it seemed a good buy, 'just' to get the old negs and slides into the light of day and see what I got! Quality is NOT it's strong suit, but it is fast, and good enough for web display, at least full-frame. Then, I could go back, and cherry pic the frames that I wanted to make a 'better' quality scan of with the Acer, or if I saw a sectional enlargement in there, to camera scan with the duplicator lens on the electric picture maker.
Making camera scans is rather more laborious, especially from negatives; I'm essentially taking a digital photo of the neg; which the has to be inverted in Photo Shop, the color cast removed and the colour balance adjusted or normalized 'manually', after manually setting the exposure on the camera, which can mean doing a bit of chimping. But, to get decent resolution sectional enlargements, it's a method that tends to work better than trying to take a crop section from conventional scan, if a far amount of enlargement is required.
But upshot of the matter is horses for courses, and how good a scan you really need or want, and whether even a dedicated film scanner is necessarily the most appropriate means of getting it especially if you want only a small sectional crop from it.
Which brings us back to the top somewhat, how to get the 'best' from the scanner/Vuescan.... which now really depends on what is 'best' for you.... and how much time and faffing you want to do! ut I would advise spending a bit of time experimenting, and f you haven't tried it, scanning via twain into an editor, rather than direct to jpg, and playing with the mult-pass multi-exposure settings..
