Re: Slide Scanner - Preliminary Report ...

jgunning Wrote {on 10/11/14}:
========================================
> ... The most difficult thing to scan is
> Kodachrome.  The dyes don't seem
> to match many scanners well.

AMEN to that, Jim - see below!

> The 5000 and 9000 Nikon scanners have
> a good Kodachrome setting built in and
> do a much better job on Kodachrome.


Russo Loco Wrote {on 10/15/14}:
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> Thank you, Jim -
>
> You have been really generous in taking
> the time to respond to my many questions.
> I have already gotten some ideas on how to
> improve my results from the excellent site
> by Mr. Fulton which you mentioned {above}.
> I am anxious to try these out and will report
> back with examples as my skills hopefully
> improve.


The Nikon 9000 has proven without a doubt to be superior to my old CanoScan 9500, and greatly superior to the Epson V-600 with which the Canon was (mistakenly) replaced.  In all fairness, I must admit that 8.5x11" document scans I have done with the Epson are more uniform than those from the Canon, which greatly facilitates "stitching together" scans done from two sections of a large document placed sequentially at 180° from one another (see [ngdiscussion.net].)

Comparison of scans of certain favorite color slides - both 35mm and 6x7cm - shows the Canon to be sharper than the Epson, and the Nikon sharper than either of the others, but I am still having trouble getting the colors to look bright yet natural.  This is a big problem with some of my 35mm Kodachromes dating from 1968 that were underexposed a little for optimum projection and even more by adverse conditions - such as shooting "against the sun" ...

Thanks to VueScan - and having lots of time on my hands that gives me the freedom to Ex-Sperry-Ment * - I have been able to more-or-less rescue all but two of the victims of the unfortunate combination of my youthful inexperience and high-contrast, slow color film.  Here are some of the results so far, with VueScan's color input set to Kodachrome and some subsequent tweaking in PS Elements 10:



A couple of them are so dark and contrasty that they're hopeless in color; the only reason that I haven't thrown the original slides away - along with several other rejects from those two days - is that the trains shown are the very last revenue freights over Cumbres Pass, on August 28 & 29, 1968, and that semi-acceptable b&w images can be obtained from them.

There's one more slide from this series that I think is worth the effort to rescue.  I have scanned it several times, saving the 48-bit scans using many different combinations of exposure and color settings in VueScan, and then working on them as "Camera Raw" and both 48- and 24-bit files in PhotoShop Elements 10.  In all cases below I first tried my best to get the photo looking at least somewhat acceptable in Camera Raw, and then used the 'Brighten Shadows / Darken Highlights' and 'Levels' tools to get the blacks, whites and greys correct, but as you can see - even after using 'Levels' - in many cases the colors still seem off in the adjusted ('-s#-adj') files:


The "adjusted" version of scan #3 was so bad I simply discarded both files.   IMHO, the "infrared" b&w conversion from scan #5 is more dramatic than the "vivid" conversion from scan #4, and in both cases the desaturated colors look better to me than the adjusted ones (#4 shows slightly better detail on the front of the engine).   Any and all advice for further improvements will be GREATLY appreciated!

- Russ

* As noted previously, "Ex-Sperry-Ment" means "from (or out of) the mind of Sperry - NOT "Sperry is out of his mind" (although I'm sure there are those who would argue that the latter is more accurate).



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2015 10:39PM by Russo Loco.