Plustek OpticFilm 7200 - Vuescan tips?

[cardiff_gareth]

So I bought a used Plustek OpticFilm 7200 scanner and yup, couldn't use the Silverfast 6 SE software as it was registered to someone else, couldn't even download the 6.6 SE update as it again told me it was registered to someone else. I downloaded VueScan and had a play with the demo version.

Has anyone got any tips to get better scans? I want to see if I can get good scans nailed in before buying the full version hence the watermark.

2021-08-26-0002 by Gareth Williams, on Flickr

Thanks in advance, below are my settings used, maybe I needed to use the grain reduction box?

 

[RaglanSurf]

What film is it? Is that the scan or the preview?

 

[cardiff_gareth]

That's the scan at 3600 dpi.

Film was Kentmere 400.

 

[dmb]

Mostly the same settings I use for BW on my 7200 and 8200i except find that Black and White points of 0.1% as a starting point give a better first scan and then tweak those and curve points if needed to produce a reasonabl Greyscale jpg. I only use Tiff and occasionally Tiff dng if I need to do more tweaking in Lightroom or PS as basically those are producing RAW files that will need adjusting.

 

[ChrisR]

My settings are similar, I think. I'll usually only bother with 2400 spi, but I'll often do 2 or 4 scans (multi-scan rather than multi-exposure mostly for negative film), which seem to result in a "smoother" result. Oh, I usually scan to JPEG as well, so you can see what sort of photographer I am (though I actually did a comparative test and could see no advantage in TIFFs). Not sure what advantage dng rather than tiff gives you?

The other thing worth doing is to choose BW in Preferences (which is the histogram showing black and white points). If you set the black and white points to just bound the main area of the histogram, you're usually capturing all the data there is and not compressing it (as I understand it). And Vuescan usually does a pretty good job of matching your settings on subsequent scans.

I'll do a little PP on the scans after import to Capture One Pro: usually just auto Levels, maybe a mid-tone adjustment and a bit of added Clarity (rarely does it need actual Sharpening). Might be tough to get all that right with the watermark muddying the waters?