Digital BW, The Print

Don't use the "Restore Colors" and "Restore Fading" settings unless you are 
scanning old and faded images. That's what is changing the colors from your 
slides. You should expect the preview image to be somewhat low contrast. 
Don't worry about it. You will change that later in Photoshop. The point of 
Vuescan is to get all the information into Photoshop so you can play with 
it. If you make the image look good in the Vuescan preview, chances are you 
are losing a good bit of the information. I typically scan slides with the 
"Image" setting, black point of 0 and white point of 1. When they come into 
Photoshop, they look dull and lifeless, but a look at the histogram reveals 
that there is no information clipped and there is no "combing" indicating 
potential posterization when I print. Then I set the "real" black and white 
points and adjust the contrast curve in Photoshop. I usually do all this 
while viewing the image in my printer profile.

Hope this helps,
Stan
================================
Photography by Stan McQueen
http://www.smcqueen.com

At 02:03 PM 6/20/2003, you wrote:
>First of all, thanks to all of you for kindly reponding to my
>ignorant questions on this.
>
>I may be getting a bit off-topic here, since the forum is about the
>print (and so please
>feel free to respond off-list if you think this is not relevant), but
>I'm frustrated in my
>effort to get good prints by my ignorance about all the steps leading
>up to the print. I
>don't have a background in computer art, so all this is still fairly
>new territory for me,
>and I
>think I've hit a point in my scanning and printing efforts where my
>ambitions exceed
>my limited technical know-how, and I realize I need to do a lot of
>studying if I want to
>get the kind of results I'm hoping for. Apparently many or most of
>the people on this
>list truly understand the finer technical points of scanning,
>Photoshop color and
>contrast manipulation (not to mention Curves), histograms, profiling
>of scanners,
>monitors, printers, the Zone System and so on. I really haven't
>mastered these things
>yet and have been stumbling through, managing to make some good
>photos but not
>understanding the key techniques. I realize I should know how to do
>all these things,
>but I don't yet -- and would welcome suggestions about what websites
>or books to
>read. I will continue
>studying the Vuescan manual, but I think I need some more basic
>primers. Hope I
>don't have to start with a calculus course...
>
>Basically what I've been doing until now is scanning 35mm negs and
>slides through
>Vuescan on my SprintScan 4000 and then manipulating in VueScan until
>I get a
>preview image that looks good on my Powerbook G4 screen (has anyone
>successfully
>profiled one of these frustrating puppies? the image changes
>depending on viewing
>angle, how long it's been turned on,
>etc.) and then going from there. I understand how to change black and
>white points
>on a histogram in PS, but I don't know how to change it in Vuescan so
>that the image
>isn't clipped -- as it often is. I had thought it was due to the
>limitations of the SS4000
>that the highlights are often blown out and shadows are muddy, since
>they're visible
>in my transparencies. Glad to know it's not  the scanner's fault, but
>I'm still not totally
>clear on how to change the histogram so  that the various lines don't
>run up the side
>(clipping, right?)... I've tried changing the  selection in the Image
>Curve pulldown on
>the Color tab, but often that just causes the  values to become even
>more bunched up
>to one side, and the image looks terrible.
>
>Also I have been scanning with Media Type set to Image, but some
>function
>somewhere is still changing the colors for me so that I'm not getting
>colors similar to
>what I see on the slide. Should I avoid using Restore Colors and
>Restore Fading? Using
>my ignorant WYSIWYG approach, it seemed to me that turning those off
>gave me gray,
>low-contrast images, but I guess only the histogram should matter and
>not what I see
>in Vuescan, right?
>
>Anyway, I'm willing to spend an hour to get each image looking right;
>I would just like
>to have a method so I'm making good use of that hour.