Nature’s histogram?

A couple of weeks a ago I bought a copy of ColorNeg. Colin has written extensively about using ColorNeg with VueScan’s raw scans, so I thought I’d give it a shot. The trial version of the plugin is pretty much worthless as it obscures the results with a heavy grid of noise, but I plumped down my sixty bucks anyway. I was quickly disappointed. Although ColorNeg worked wonders with some scans, with others it turned out flat, muddy junk. ColorNeg’s manual suggest that non-linear scans are to blame for poor results. I’d been scanning in 16 bit linear mode on my Scan Dual IV, but I thought it was possible that the scans weren’t truly linear. That ‘linear’ scans using the negative and positive settings didn’t look exactly the same lent some credence to this hypothesis. In hopes of getting truly linear scans, I plunked down another $80 for VueScan Pro. Ah, now that works.

Has Kate seen the light too?

Call me a convert. After years of dismissing VueScan as irrelevant at best, I’ve discovered what many already knew; VueScan’s raw scanning feature is the bomb for B&W. If you let VueScan do the inversions, it’s no better than any other scanner software, but the raw scans are something else entirely. The raw Tiffs are all bunched up in the highlights, but they expand nicely, much more so than simple positive scans. I suspect that this means I will no longer have to result to underdevelopment to protect the highlights in my negs, which should help shadow detail, something that suffered with my previous technique. A little extra PS work is required, and there is room for error here, but in the end, the raw scans make scanning much more predictable. In some ways, it’s more like working in a darkroom; I can tell by looking at the negative how I should work it in PS, something which wasn’t always possible before.

After a night of celebrating the glories of VueScan

I should note at this point that I still haven’t had much luck with ColorNeg. It does work, but not significantly better than doing the inversions and adjustments on my own. It does seem to work better with TriX and HP5 than with Delta 400, which makes me suspect that its gamma is geared towards working with films with a more traditional curve than the straight line T grain films. I haven’t played around with it enough to be sure.

Filed under Doh!