Thanks, Ken.
I tried Vuescan many, many years ago and could never get a decent scan.
Maybe it's time to try it again? How steep is the learning curve? With
Silverfast, what you get is a 48 bit HDR scan from two exposures. This
gives you a raw file, very dark, which has to be converted in PS or Camera
Raw or Silverfast's own conversion program. Maybe I'm messing up with the
conversion or the post-processing. Here is another Kodachrome scan:
http://www.pbase.com/tinamanley/image/142780231
Do you see the same problems there?
I have already scanned 5000 slides but I have 500,000 to go and don't want
to scan them all but once!!
Tina
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 9:56 PM, Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Tina,
>
> I'm struggling understanding what is going on with your Kodachrome 64
> scans. I'm suspecting that we have a combination of issues you are
> fighting and not realizing that you are fighting. In the Faviana and
> Remundo photo, we have several issues, but they seem to be universal
> to some of the other K64 shots too. Here's the observations behind my
> stating this:
>
> 1. Kodachrome is an extremely fine-grained film. It is perfectly
> capable of a double-truck spread without being much more than a touch
> sandy. Sometimes, we'd see an interaction between the half-tone
> screens and the grain, but we didn't get the globular mess that we saw
> with Ektachrome.
>
> 2. The colors tend to have good tonal separation in Kodachrome 64.
> What I'm seeing is specifically the oranges getting blocked up.
>
> 3. The blues are definitely off. If the boy's hair is blue in the
> slide then I suspect the film suffered from heat or x-ray damage.
> Meanwhile, the blues desaturated elsewhere. This is evident in the
> greens which turned olive. (I'm usually used to greens turning bluish
> gray in Kodachrome). Yet, what I think is a wood stump behind the boy
> is gray. (Traditional Kodachrome rendering of wood, whereas
> Fujichromes will turn wood into some shade of tan).
>
> 4. The slide does have a slight look that it's been projected and
> suffered a little bit of damage from that.
>
> I supect that your scan came pretty close to the visual examination of
> the slide when viewed over a NON-color-balanced, full-spectrum viewing
> table. Unfortunately, if the lightsource behind your viewing table is
> not full-spectrum, you're going to suffer from misinterpreting the
> color rendering in the slide. For some reason, from my own experience,
> Kodachrome is easier to misread than other films. Not in overall
> tonality, but in how some colors are rendered.
>
> The color profile for the scan is off. It may match a color target or
> even other slides, but this one may have other issues which have
> caused the profile to be incorrect.
>
> The scan has the look that it was underexposed during the scan process
> and everything was boosted through the profile or level management.
> You mention that you use Silverfast. I'm not very familiar with that
> program, but usually use Vuescan for my scans. A side benefit of
> Vuescan is that Vuescan's IR cleaning algorithm now works on
> Kodachrome! Anyway, this looks like we're pulling up the exposure of
> the scan in the computer instead of increasing the exposure time
> during the scan. Unlike Ektachromes and Fujichromes, which pull up ok,
> Kodachrome scans more like a B&W film and doesn't handle shadow
> lifting. If fact, it is almost like trying to work with a digital
> camera image that has been pulled up 2-3 stops.
>
> Judging from the grain pattern and other artifacts, I'm guessing that
> you are using a 4000dpi Nikon scanner. Mine is a V-ED. The Nikon
> scanners tend to find grain where there is no grain. It's big on grain
> aliasing. One way around this is to overscan (multi-pass). This will
> reduce the scanner's ultimate resolution, but much of that loss can be
> recovered with care.
>
> Which leads me to the next point. I'm seeing some artifacts in the
> bokeh of the Faviana and Reymundo photo which is a characteristic of
> the 35/1.4, but is exaggerated by USM sharpening. Earlier, I was
> mentioning an overscan and multi-pass sharpening method I use on some
> of my slides. The big problem with the Nikon scanner in single-pass is
> that we have a slight resolution loss thanks to the scanner's optics,
> yet we also have the grain aliasing. It seems pretty natural to throw
> a 2 or 3-pixel USM on the scanned image. What that does with some of
> the tight bokeh traits of that particular lens is that it makes the
> bokeh harsh and unnatural. Instead of a nice penumbra, the
> transitional fade pattern will develop steps.
>
> I'm not sure what advice I'd pass on yet. Most of your images in your
> pbase account have the smoothness I'd expect to see from a K64 slide
> (especially in the railroad gallery), but these Guatamala slides just
> aren't quite there. If I were to recommend trying something I'd say to
> scan "The SC40-2" (Image 964s) again (to achieve identical results of
> the original scan) and apply those same exact settings to the "Faviana
> and Reymundo" slide and see what happens.
>
> My point in all this is that this particular slide in question did not
> digitize in a manner that I would ever expect to see from K64. What I
> did is idenitfy a different image which did digitize in an expected
> manner and am recommending that you attempt a baseline adjustment with
> that as a starting point for this slide. It might also turn out off,
> but at least it would be worth a try as part of the problem
> identification. I do notice that other images seem to suffer from
> blues in the shadows, so we might definitely have a profile problem.
>
> Ken
>
> --
> Ken Norton
> ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.zone-10.com
> --
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>
>
--
Tina Manley, ASMP
www.tinamanley.com
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