Here it is: http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc15.htm#topic12
Which is
1. Set Input | Media
2. Insert film with a transparent area
3. If Input | Lock exposure is visible, clear Input | Lock exposure
4. Press the Preview button
5. Adjust cropping if necessary
6. If Input | Lock exposure is visible, set Input | Lock exposure
7. Press the Preview button again
8. If Input | Lock film base color is visible, set Input | Lock film base color
For step #2 above, use a film frame that has an area that would print as pure black for negative, or pure white for slides.
Point 2. is the problem. When I tried to follow this procedure on the frame I have been demonstrating (above posts), I tried to use the select rectangle to select an area between sprocket holes. This does not work. As soon as I press "Preview", the selection grows until it extends into the image proper. I never see any "Input|Lock exposure" option.
I suspect that the "a transparent area" portion of step 2. means "use a frame that is completely blank", which won't work with the vast majority of rolls of negatives that have no blank frames. (Both Canon DPP and Adobe ACR let me do a white balance click in an area between sprocket holes and they do do a white balance adjustment.)
Setting that aside, I went back to the "Color" tab in VueScan, clicked on "Default", and then set the film parameters from "Generic" to match the roll of Kodak Gold 200 that I was using. The main difference is that VueScan defaults to "Color balance: White balance" instead of "Color Balance: Auto Levels" that I had used in my previous demonstration (above post). I'm not going to show an example of that, because it was "fuglier" than the previous VueScan example I displayed--it had an additional green-cyan color cast.
I also tried clicking the VueScan white balance tool in an unexposed (between sprocket holes) area of the file with even "fuglier" results.
I'd really, really like to come up with a workflow that uses VueScan because VueScan is a lot cheaper than (perpetual license) full Photoshop. But after trying to use VueScan for a number of years, I can never achieve results better than the example I displayed in my above post.
(TL; DR section. VueScan works really well with Nikon scanners because Nikon scanners essentially remove the orange mask in hardware by exposing the R, G, and B channels separately, which has the effect of mostly removing the orange mask. I had an email exchange with Ed Hamrick several years ago about color quality when converting negatives and he sent me a VueScan RAW file from a Nikon scanner. Which worked fine with VueScan. And was almost perfect after opening it in Photoshop and doing a Ctrl-I inversion and a bit of gamma correction. But Nikon scanners don't exist anymore. And the kind of scanners that people can buy now (Epson, Plustek, etc.) don't remove the orange mask in the scanner hardware like the Nikon scanners did. This may apply to other (not made anymore) high end scanners--I only have the single Nikon (VueScan) RAW file that Ed sent me. Ed seemed to think that the color conversion problem was solved because VueScan worked fine with Nikon scanners.)
Have you used VueScan yourself to convert camera scans of color negatives? The RAW file of the camera scan I am working with is linked from my
Camera Scanning your Negatives page. (Under "Converting method 1. Using Canon DPP and Photoshop") If I am overlooking something in VueScan operation, I'd really like to know what I am overlooking. So I can write up a VueScan camera scanning workflow that people can use.
Alexiz, thanks for the tip about the ColorPerfect plugin.
Wayne