Philip Pemberton wrote:
> Hi,
> I've just finished uploading a good chunk of my photos to my new online
> gallery at <http://gallery.philpem.me.uk/>. As a result of my getting a new
> (well, second-hand, not that it really matters) film scanner -- a Minolta
> DiMAGE Scan Dual IV -- and I'm using that as an excuse to get a load of
> negatives scanned.
>
> I'm using VueScan Pro at the moment, but for some reason if I use any of
> the film profiles other than "Generic colour negative", I get a nasty colour
> cast on the scan.
The choices on the Color page for Negative vendor, brand and type aren't
really profiles. They hark back to the early days of VueScan. All they
do is to correct for the orange mask in color negative film. The maskd
aren't the same from film to film, so they can introduce a color cast
when the correction isn't right, as you have seen. You can see from the
selections available that Ed mostly had Kodak film and stopped doing
them long ago. There used to be a way to scan a portion of a clear
frame, where only the orange base shows, and set that as fixed for the
rest of the roll. I suppose it is still somewhere in the menus. If I
remember, I'll post it.
> Using the GCN profile with White Balance usually produces pretty good scans.
Using White Balance should correct any film base imbalance. The problem
with auto WB is that it has to make an assumption about the total color
composition of the subject. For many subjects, this works fine. When you
get one like this, WB will give quite unsatisfactory results
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/tech/WBalance/9-641_25wb.htm>. Look
down th page for roll-overs that show what the White Balance option
does. I generally use Neutral as my default.
> For what it's worth, even the Reala profile is pretty
> useless on the current revision of the Reala film. It does have less
> noticeable grain than any other film I've tried, hence why there's currently
> three 35mm rolls of it in the fridge. Oh, and the six rolls of Kodak Colour
> Plus 200 in the cupboard. Maybe I should get some slide film to have a play
> with...
>
Here's where you can help yourself. Buy an IT8 target and shoot a
relatively full frame shot of it in normal sunlight. Then follow the
instructions in the "Film Profiling with IT8 Targets" section of the
user guide to build an ICC profile for your film. You then set this
profile whenever you scan tht particular type of film. It's like magic,
correcting not only for the orange mask, but for the color
characteristics of the film emulsion. If you want normal color balanced
results from other lighting, you can shoot the IT8 target under that
light and create a color profile for it. It is a very powerful tool.
Here are some examples scanning with and without ICC profile in VueScan
<http://galleries.moosemystic.net/VuesProf/>.
> A few of you may remember the blurry photos of the red squirrels I posted
> about last year. I've rescanned these, and found a couple others that were in
> focus and enhanceable to the point where I could actually see something..
> These are in the "Scotland 2005" section, in the "Drumlanrig Castle" album.
>
LOL, still pretty blurry! I can let you know where there are some much
more accommodating red squirrels
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/MPhotos/Sigma600/pages/16_1688_f.htm>.
You just need a long lens and a ticket to Maine.
> There's also some scans in the "Temple Newsam" album from the first roll of
> Reala I ran through the OM4. The photos seem a bit light to me - maybe
> slightly overexposed? It was a very bright day - I suspect the OM4's meter
> might have gotten a little confused by all the bright light sources.
>
I suspect that the problem is less with exposure than with
scanning/processing. Color neg film is problematic from a scanning and
printing point of view, as it has so much exposure latitude that it
captures more brightness range than can be shown on a monitor or
printed. If you use color balance of Neutral or White Balance without a
film ICC profile, that whole range is stretched out linearly between the
white and black points. The result is a rather flat looking image. It is
good if you scan in 16 bit and plan to adjust the image in post
processing, as the whole range is there to be organized s you see fit.
It is disconcerting, though, for anyone used to thinking of color neg in
terms of the prints produced by automated processor/printer systems.
They make all kinds of assumptions about what is important in average
images and do lots of adjusting to what is on the negative. The
"Scanning Color Negative Film" page of the Users Guide says much the
same thing in different words.
In scanning color neg film yourself, you have to take over the
responsibility of deciding whether and how much of highlight and shadow
detail is compressed and/or clipped off and what the contrast in the
central tonality areas is. The good news is that this allows you to come
up with much better results than the automated process. The primary
tools in VueScan for doing this are the brightness and black and white
point adjustments in the color tab and the curve adjustments available
under the Image Menu.
I tend to do the rough adjustment in VueScan, if I don't have an ICC
profile for the film I'm scanning, and the rest in PS. The images in
your gallery generally have all the tonality information needed in them,
it's just not distributed to best advantage. I've done some quick and
dirty adjustment a few of your images to illustrate this point
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/Pemberton/index.htm>.
VueScan is a very powerful tool, which, unfortunately, means it's a bit
complicated. Play with some of the controls, especially those on the
Color tab and the Curves to see what they do to the preview image and
learn how to drive it and you can make wonderful scanned images.
> ......
>
> Before anyone comments on how most of the photos look "foggy".. that's
> because it was foggy on the day we chose to visit NYC.
Scanning/processing can cut through a lot of the fog, if one wants to.
> ...........
>
> Some hints on getting dust off film would also be much appreciated. Canned
> air seems to have no effect on the stuff that's stuck to some of my films,
> especially the ones from New York (the skyline shot is about the worst).
> Scratches I can fix, huge clumps of dust and drying marks I can't. Well, not
> without major work anyway.
>
Canned "air" does pretty well for me. Chuck uses small pieces cut off
Swiffer dust mop refills (Flash brand in the UK):
> "I've reported here before that Swiffer dusters
> <http://www.homemadesimple.com/sites/en_US/swiffer/usenglish/products/dusters.shtml>
> seem to do a good job of removing dust from film before scanning. I cut off
> the white fabric parts and then cut the fluffy section into smaller pieces
> and store them in a zip-lock plastic bag between uses."
A static gun may also help discharge static that is holding the dust to
the film. These were sold for use on vinyl records, so are often
available cheap at garage sales, and charity resale shops like GoodWill.
Moose
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