Digital BW, The Print

Stan,

Can you please explain how you set Vuescan to capture all the tonal range of the 
image? Also, if it's not too complicated, how do you adjust the curves in Photoshop?

I use Vuescan with a Polaroid SS4000, and I've been about ready to give up on 
Vuescan lately, because I do get very inconsistent scans, especially with color slides 
(media type set to Image). I get one nearly perfect one, then 
one too yellow, too green, or much too contrasty, or more than one of those. I can't 
figure out how to tweak what I see in the histograms, other than changing the 
selected Image Curve on the Color tab. The various Brightness and Black & White 
Point adjustments are a mystery to me.

I thought maybe the problem was a scanner calibration issue... I was thinking of 
going back to Silverfast, which came with an IT-8 calibration slide. The problems 
have really made me frustrated with the whole process of scanning. And the 
inconsistency seems to mean that I can't really do batch scans, even from the same 
roll of film.

Peter


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Stan McQueen <stan@s...> 
wrote:
> I use Vuescan almost 100% of the time because I have found I get 
> better scans with it than with almost anything else on virtually all of my 
> images. Maybe you're expecting the scan to look great as it comes in from 
> the scanner. Rather than that, I set Vuescan to capture all of the tonal 
> range of the image, which makes the image somewhat low contrast initially, 
> then I make curve adjustments in Photoshop. This way, I know I'm getting 
> all the image has to offer. Other software I have used made the initial 
> scan look better than Vuescan, but I found that usually one or the other or 
> both ends of the tonal range were getting clipped, so I wasn't getting all 
> the information. I also do no sharpening or filtering in the scanning 
> software. I do all this in Photoshop.
> 
> Stan