Scanning software

menthel

menthel

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Jim
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I am having a bloody nightmare scanning with my canoscan 9000f. It came with 2 lots of software, one very basic and silverfast which is an unintuitive and pain in the butt piece of software. What else are people using? Is vuescan any good? Does it have profiles for film and slides?
 
HMM! Don't think I am going to help much bbbuuutttttt

I have a Nikon scanner which I use the stuff that came shipped with it, I also have another scanner which I use Silverfast and yes it is a pain. However it can work well but you have to really work at at and the controls are not intuitive.

Have a look at the Computer Darkroom where you can find lots of tutorials on Silverfast which helped when I was trying to suss it out.

I believe Vuescan is good but have never used it.
 
I've used a trial version of Vuescan and it seemed good to me, but the negative profiles seemed to not have been updated for a while as some recent popular ones were not available and there seemed to be an abundance of older ones. It was about 6 months ago that I tried it though so it may have improved now.
There are no profiles for slide films as you don't need them, a scanner will scan any slide film (except Kodachrome) correctly (according to its settings) as theres no film colour mask that varies from film to film like with negative film, your just literally scanning an image like its being projected. Obviously for optimum results with slide film though you do have to profile the scanner with a target.
 
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I started with the basic Silverfast that came with my Caoscan 8800F, which I found pretty effective, but about as user friendly as a cornered rat. When I had a couple of rolls of Kodachrome to scan back end of last year, I upgraded the software to the SE version which gave a Kodachrome profile and allowed a few more options to be tweaked. I'm sure that the full version would be better still, but it's just a bit too much brass for me.

When I was moaning about not being able to get what I wanted out of silverfast, someone - probably Nick come to think of it, recommended the tutorials from the computer darkroom as linked above, and they did help a bit.

I think that the main problem with silverfast is that the manual is written for the full version of the software, and unless you have the full version, you'll spend ages looking for an option that's simply not there in the cut-down releases.
 
Vuescan is good and it's well worth downloading the trial version and playing with it to see how you get on. It isn't perfect by any means, and I agree with Samuel (s162216) that there is only a limited range of film profiles, but you can use it right after you've scanned with silverfast for a direct comparison of the two. I've got a flatbed and a Minolta Scandual film scanner, and the Vuescan works fine with both of them, whereas I believe some other software is specific to an individual scanner. Vuescan will also let you use an older scanner with Windows 7, so that might be an issue if there are no drivers for the scanner you've got.
 
Best way by far is to scan in Vuescan and produce a raw file, then use colorneg to do the colour balance.

Vuescan is good on it's own but doesn't have as many profiles as colorneg.
Anyone ever shot Kodak law enforcement or Ektapress PJB, Its there if you need it.
 
Thanks all. Having got back the slides of sensia 100 from my G2, scanning them in depressed me a lot! The quality looked awful on screen, despite the slides themselves looking great. The slides have come out dark and with no fine detail, which is there even looking at the slide with the naked eye.

I can't use silverfast, the UI and process is so convoluted and counter-intuitive that it makes me angry! I will download vuescan and see how the demo goes.

If I like it I will purchase. Is it then worth getting the expensive version that also allows scanner profiling? If so where do I get a slide to perform the profiling? I will also have a look at colorneg- does this work with lightroom?

One last question! Can I get a decent slide viewer from anywhere? One of the hand held jobbies?
 
I until very recently had a Nikon Coolscan V ED, and have now moved to a Minolta DiMage Multipro. My experience with Nikon was thats its own colour management was good for colour negative but it struggled with slide, in particular producing any detail in shadows. This led me to first purchasing IT8 targets from Wolf faust and profiling my scanning but eventually moving to a different scanner.

When purchasing the Minolta I experimented with both Silverfast and VueScan, both of which improved results for slide. In the end I plumped for the Vuescan as it was a lot cheaper and could as mentioned above be used with Windows 7 if I choose to upgrade my operating system, plus comes with IT8 scanner profiling, unlike Silverfast where you have to pay more for this feature. The other benefit to Vuescan is that it is not specific to the particular scanner if you decide to change.

On the slide viewer, I recently purchased a Kaiser table slide viewer which gives 3x magnification. For me this ideal as it allows to work out which slide is best to scan, giving a very good indication as to those that are sharp (or not which is more likely for me).
 
Thanks Peter. Its looking like I need to spend more money then! I will try vuescan tonight. If I get on with it I will then get some of Wolf's targets, probably for velvia and the other fuji films, although it does look like the bumper pack with just about everything in works out the same as 2 targets!

Having shot slides for the first time, it really looks som much nicer in its raw state and I can see how it would produce much better scans.
 
I can recommend vuescan also, I was using the Epson software that came with my v500, and I discarded most shots from my holiday as they looked blown and over exposed, I have to admit I was pretty disappointed at the time. I then had a go with vuescan, all be it the pro version (not sure what the differences are to be honest) and it pulled so much more detail and latitude out of all my images, let me try find an example...
 
example1.jpg


lakesnet.jpg


the first being the Epson scan, the second Vuescan - now I personally prefer the latter, but some may prefer the first.
 
Prefer the colour rendering of the first, but definitely better dynamic range squeezed out of the film on the second (y)
 
Right, tried vuescan and my images are still no sharper and the colours are still off! I wonder if it's my crap photography skills. Once scanned and the taken in to lightroom where the White balance is adjusted and the picture sharpened things improved a lot but if I have to do that for every one then why not shoot digital? Bah.

So, my question is what is your workflow for slides and negatives? What resolution do you scan in at?

All help appreciated!
 
I'm not really sure what results you are expecting to get Jim, but I'm wondering if you've read the review at the Imaging Resource? It does tend to suggest there are some differences with the software we've been speaking about, but if you're not finding the same as the reviewer, I guess it's possible that there is an issue with your scanner. :thinking:

http://www.imaging-resource.com/SCAN/CS9000/9000F.HTM
 
Thanks for that. I will have an in depth read tomorrow. I will post up some examples tomorrow, although it does look like sharpening is required post scan whatever happens. I am finding this all very frustrating, especially as I can see the differences between the scans and the slides even with the naked eye.
 
Read this on Imaging Resource as well - it has several things that apply to what you want to know, specifically why you have to sharpen scanned images with higher resolutions (its actually no fault of the scanner):

http://www.imaging-resource.com/SCAN/V600/V600.HTM#sho

Its related to the Epson V600 but applies to most scanners in general.

Have you scanned with unsharp mask on? This does a basic but good job of sharpening the scanned images but its generally better to use lightroom or similar like you've done.

Once you've profiled your scanner with a target the results from slides should look better.
 
menthel said:
Right, tried vuescan and my images are still no sharper and the colours are still off! I wonder if it's my crap photography skills. Once scanned and the taken in to lightroom where the White balance is adjusted and the picture sharpened things improved a lot but if I have to do that for every one then why not shoot digital? Bah.

So, my question is what is your workflow for slides and negatives? What resolution do you scan in at?

All help appreciated!
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I only scan negs but scanning takes a bit of tweaking to get good consistent results. If you are scanning slides then get a wolf target for your type of film and that should give you an excellent starting point.
Scanning negs in Vuescan, best way if you aren't getting good results is to use the lock film base option.
Colorneg is a PS plugin and works like a colour enlarger, only takes me around 20 seconds to get the colour balance correct.
I use an Epson V700 and scan at 2400dpi, the optical limit of the hardware, anything higher and you start loosing a bit of quality.
Stick at it, it took me around 3 months to get it right, too many boxes to tick and sliders to play with.
 
Thanks Samuel and Ed. I think part of the problem is that I just don't get the time to sit down, scan and then play. I will get the wolf targets- I have sensia and velvia on the go at the moment and it would seem that it is actually just as cheap to buy his 'pack' of targets as this will actually be the same price as just the 2 for these films.

I think I actually need just to spend the money on Vuescan too, its difficult to tell anything from the trial version. I will also have a look at colorneg. If it doesn't work with lightroom I have PSE 8 to try it with.
 
Well I find vuescan and silverfast a PITA to use, Epson own scanning program is very good for most negs...........I'd like to know what program the supermarkets use for scanning as most of their scans are very good for colour balance and only need a tweak in Photoshop.
 
excalibur2 said:
Well I find vuescan and silverfast a PITA to use, Epson own scanning program is very good for most negs...........I'd like to know what program the supermarkets use for scanning as most of their scans are very good for colour balance and only need a tweak in Photoshop.
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I'm pretty sure it's dedicated software in the case of the Fuji SP-2000 scanners (the scanning rear end of the Frontier 350 minilabs) that are reported in the exif details of my minilab scans.


Edit: of course, you could pick up one second hand from ebay... it comes with the software and the manual ;)
 
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TheBigYin said:
I'm pretty sure it's dedicated software in the case of the Fuji SP-2000 scanners (the scanning rear end of the Frontier 350 minilabs) that are reported in the exif details of my minilab scans.
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And are probably a bit pricey! ;)
 
TheBigYin said:
I'm pretty sure it's dedicated software in the case of the Fuji SP-2000 scanners (the scanning rear end of the Frontier 350 minilabs) that are reported in the exif details of my minilab scans.


Edit: of course, you could pick up one second hand from ebay... it comes with the software and the manual ;)
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I'm sure these machines can scan well above the usual low supermarket scans of about 3-4mp, I've asked the staff at supermarkets can you scan higher but they don't know....shame :( I'd pay an extra £1 for high resolution scans of up to 36 shot onto a Cd.... erm and I don't mind a few hairs or dust spots.
 
With VueScan, the pro version anyway, you don't need to select a film profile necessarily. You can sample the base color of your negative film directly by selecting a clear area, preview it, select "lock exposure" under the input tab, preview it again and select "lock film base color" for that roll of film. Subsequent scans of that roll will be more consistent and derived off the actual base of the film. There are tips on the VueScan web page for that process.
 
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AlanSmithee said:
With VueScan, the pro version anyway, you don't need to select a film profile necessarily. You can sample the base color of your negative film directly by selecting a clear area, preview it, select "lock exposure" under the input tab, preview it again and select "lock film base color" for that roll of film. Subsequent scans of that roll will be more consistent and derived off the actual base of the film. There are tips on the VueScan web page for that process.
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I'm registered with viewscan and they say something like "free upgrades" erm great so downloaded latest version 9 to try it and I've got watermarks over the scan...WTF I've got to re-install version 8 back :razz:
 
excalibur2 said:
I'm registered with viewscan and they say something like "free upgrades" erm great so downloaded latest version 9 to try it and I've got watermarks over the scan...WTF I've got to re-install version 8 back :razz:
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Your registration key was not found. I think you can just enter it manually again. You did save it, right?
 
AlanSmithee said:
Your registration key was not found. I think you can just enter it manually again. You did save it, right?
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Well when I go to help/about it shows:-

Email address......OK
Serial Number......Ok
Customer number..OK

I assume the OK means Viewscan has Okayed it when installing latest version, but I suppose I could find everything and re-enter again.
 
menthel said:
Thanks Samuel and Ed. I think part of the problem is that I just don't get the time to sit down, scan and then play. I will get the wolf targets- I have sensia and velvia on the go at the moment and it would seem that it is actually just as cheap to buy his 'pack' of targets as this will actually be the same price as just the 2 for these films.

I think I actually need just to spend the money on Vuescan too, its difficult to tell anything from the trial version. I will also have a look at colorneg. If it doesn't work with lightroom I have PSE 8 to try it with.
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Forgive my ignorance, but what's a 'wolf target'?

I've googled and only found lots of references to shooting targets :thinking:
 
Bought Vuescan last night, I think it's really good with my 7600i. It's quite straightforward. I don't see an easy way to convert RAW negs in Lightroom to positive images, so at the moment I'm scanning to .Tiff files and importing, they often only need straightening up and a bit of sharpening or something.

Very pleased and It's nice to be able to make 7600DPI images from a 35mm neg :)

Cheers
ped
 
Ped, don't want to be alarmist, but have you checked the 7600i with colour negative and slide stock or just with black and white. Only reason ask is that Darren (cowasaki) had some fairly major problems with a couple of them - as in, they wouldn't scan colour correctly...

here and here.
 
Hi mate

Yes I tried a slide and it looked OK with Silverfast, haven't tried it with Vuescan though. To be honest as I can't develop colour at home I send it away and get them scanned to CD anyway so I'm not fussed in this case. I rarely use colour film.

ped
 
ped said:
Hi mate

Yes I tried a slide and it looked OK with Silverfast, haven't tried it with Vuescan though. To be honest as I can't develop colour at home I send it away and get them scanned to CD anyway so I'm not fussed in this case. I rarely use colour film.

ped
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Cool - just didn't want you to try colour 6 months down the line and the machine not work for you. (y)
 
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