Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Landscape & Nature Photography => Topic started by: Dan Sroka on September 23, 2003, 02:14:23 pm

Title: Help me avoid scanner insanity
Post by: Dan Sroka on September 23, 2003, 02:14:23 pm
Your hardware is fine. It's just that scanning slides is tricky. Not impossible, but tricky. What I find most difficult is that some beautiful colors you see on the light table are almost impossible to scan... it all come down to the challenge of translating an illuminated color to a bitmap color.

One thing you may want to check out is the program VueScan (www.hamrick.com). Demo it first before you buy. Vuescan is a swiss army knife of scanning software. It cracks open your scanner and gives you access to its nuts and bolts. It is not a simple tool to use, but it can be a very very effective one (I prefer it to the Minolta software that came with my scanner).

A couple sites to check:
General scanning tips (http://www.scantips.com/)
Color neg scanning (http://homepage.mac.com/onelucent/VS/vsm.html) (I know, you are doing slides, but he give a good description of VueScan).
Title: Help me avoid scanner insanity
Post by: Sean Evison on September 23, 2003, 12:51:05 pm
I have a Nikon 4000 ED scanner. It works well for negatives with scans that need little or no Photoshop manipulation.

Sadly it is not the same with slides - slides are always too dark with hints of over saturation.  This is the case even for perfectly exposed slides.

I have tried everything I can think of - Colour Management on or off. I have used the Nikon tools but it is always a case of rubbish in/rubbish out.

I have found that if I convert the Adobe RGB to Color Match within Photoshop this gets rid of some of the darkness but can introduce some undesirbale colour shifts.

If I can't sort this out(and as I have taken 99% slides for the last 10 years) I am thinking of switching to - maybe- the new Minolta Dimage 5400 but I am worried that I will have the same problems.

It is very frustrating as every review I read about the Nikon says how good it is but that has never been my experience
with both the 4000 and the LS30 which suffered from the same problem.

Any thoughts anyone?
Title: Help me avoid scanner insanity
Post by: Sean Evison on October 02, 2003, 05:22:22 am
Thanks for the advice - I've purchased Vuescan.