Scanning Color Negatives With Vuescan

In this video kyle mcdougall does a pretty rigorous comparison of two types of scanning software.

Scanning color negatives with vuescan.

File sizes are bigger. Choosing color negative will make vuescan do terrible things to your pictures based on profiles it has for various types of film. Obviously we don t want this or any other behind the scenes adjustments so the first thing to do is set vuescan s media type to image same as we. Screenshot of vuescan with a prescan of a slide in progress.

I do have a purchased copy of the software. This allows scanning more than one image at a time. Slide film maps a density range of 0 2 7 to an intensity range of 1 500 but negative film maps a smaller density range of 0 2 4 to a larger intensity range of 1 4000. Negative lab pro and vuescan.

To do so he takes four color negatives from four different types. My old high end drum scanner hell s3900 is a fantastic piece of equipment but the software is totally unsuited to scanning color negatives. But the other issue is that scanning a color negative is a highly subjective undertaking and no two operators will make the same decisions. It is worth it batch scanning.

Negatives bw or color have a lower density range and are lower in contrast than transparencies are. The green channel usually is more than 1 exposure value ev darker and the blue channel is 1 ev darker still. I have been scanning negatives using an epson perfection v600 photo scanner and vuescan software. See my vuescan batch scanning tutorial for directions.

Since bw negatives scan in flat you need this ability. With this tool you can reduce or even eliminate a color negative s orange mask at the time of scanning. Everything was working just fine. With negatives it s much the same.

I placed a new negative exactly like the previous one and tried previewing. I rebooted everything still can t scan a negative. Scanning color negative film. Color transparency film scanning with vuescan tutorial.

Color negative film is able to capture a much wider range of intensities than slide film and this can create a problem when scanning negative film. Left is the one with my basic setup ipad d810 tripod and the right one is my current setup elinchrom elb. Below is another scan of the same negative as before again using only my d810. This is because film scanners are made for the wide density range of a color transparency.

A 16 bit scan can take more curves and levels adjustments without losing quality than you can do with an 8 bit file.