Peter Figen wrote:
The problem with scanning Velvia on an Epson flatbed is that Velvia can potentially have a d-max of about 3.7 and the Epson will be hard pressed to hit even 3.0, so you\'re missing over two full stops of detail. In addition the Epson can\'t record all the fine highlight detail as well.
Whether or not manipulating the scanning software makes a difference depends on the scanner. At a minimum setting the endpoints - the black and white points in the scan is something that should always be done. Some scanning apps have more access than other to hardware control of the scanner. In my experience, inverting color neg scans is always better done in the scanning software, but that\'s my experience with the software that runs my scanner.
When I scan Velvia, or any color transparency film, I always start with the scanner set to the exact same settings that I used to make the scanner input profile from scanning the Hutchcolor 4x5 Velvia target. Those settings give me just a bit of headroom at both ends of the tonal range so that the rebate edge comes in about pixel level three for Velvia (around seven for Ektachrome) and around 253 for a piece of clear, fully exposed film. That scan will be very very close to the look of the original piece of film. If, like in the case of scanning Dan\'s transparency and trying to pull everything out of the shadows, it was better on the drum scanner to make basically a wide open boosted shadows scan to be blended with a more normal one. It\'s not that the scanner can\'t record the whole range at once, it\'s that it\'s often easier to have two scans that are closer to optimal tonality to blend than to try and do a ton of localized fixing. On black and whites, however, I just always scan to include everything on the neg, make a very flat scan and optimize it in Ps later.
Enough scanning stuff for 2 am...
Thank you Peter - I didn\'t see your post when making my previous one, sorry.
I don\'t have a Velvia target but sounds like I should get one, apart from the inherent dynamic range issue you mention up front.
Another approach, although one that didn\'t give me great results when I tried it on a couple of old Ektachromes, is to use my old T2-mount slide copier (35mm only) and fit it to my A7R full-frame and try a new digital copy of the slide. In it\'s own way it\'s no more perverse that digitally scanning the analog image! I know some on DPUG have had great results this way.
Re biasing for shadows and highlights in 2 scans. I did those with one of these Italian images but that was before being further up the learning curve and hence I haven\'t tried blending those two as yet.
So, thanks also for your considered input.
regards,
David
May 08, 2015 at 06:43 AM
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