On 8/15/05, Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Some time ago, I helped Ed with setting up those dimensions for the
> 5000F by scanning the whole platen with film holder in place with film
> in it so he could get the dimensions right. I know he was working with
> other(s) on the 9950F at that time. I heard on a fourm that he had it
> working. You might drop him a line. He is incredibly responsive with help.
I'll have to check on that. When I first selected the film strip
holder it didn't even have the proper number of frames showing (it
wanted to do 4x6 instead of 5x6).
> I think what you want for a flatbed with multiple frames at once is not
> Auto Crop. In the Input tab, select Mode: Transparency. A new box
> labeled Film Holder then appears with selections for the various film
> holders that come with the scanner. At least on the 5000F, they are very
> accurate. That may deal with your problem of getting only the images,
> and not the holder, in the scan.
That's what I've been doing but the autocrop ends up being off a bit.
One problem I can see with this though is that there is a bit of play
with how you position the film holder on the scanner. It's also
possible for the strips to shift a bit in the holder (depending on how
they were cut). I've been finding that as long as I'm careful with
lining up all the strips in the holder I can get a good selection on
all of the frames with only a little tweaking so that's not bothering
me any more, just took a little practice since I didn't have to do
this before.
> CanoScan may be doing some noise reduction too. They are tricky devils.
> VueScan also has a noise reduciton feature, but I've never used it.
This is true. Either way, they're doing something that cuts down on
the noise. Turning on multi-sampling clears up the noise. I'm using 4
samples at the moment but I'll give 2 a try to see if that will give
good results since that would speed up the scanning a bit.
This raises a major complaint with teh Canon software though, it's not
clear at all what the scanner is doing, even in advanced mode the
message is pretty much, "the software is smarter than you." The
documentation is abyssmal in terms of explaining what settings will
do. For instance, a favorite of mines is there's a "high quality"
setting that can be off or on (it's off by default). I used it once
and it significantly slowed down my scan. There's no indication in the
software as to what this option does. I checked the documentation and
all it says is, "scans at a higher than standard quality". Gee, that
was useful. There's no option I can find in the advanced settings for
multi-sampling so I'm guessing that's what it's doing.
Also, I found with some scans that if I set the software to auto color
(or whatever Canon calls it) I got more accurate (but still not great)
colour but you can't specify the colour space you're using and I got a
scan that was severely clipped in the blacks and whites. By choosing
the profile mode I could select their canned profile (they include 1
each for positives, negs and reflective) and select my colour space
which was great but then the colour was really out and you can't use
most of the adjustments in the scanning software so you pretty much
have to accept a bad scan and then do a lot of work in PS to fix it.
So as much as I may be complaining about Vuescan, when I look at the
alternative (Scangear) it's no contest. It's just a matter of me being
used to getting incredible scans from Vuescan that didn't need
much/any work afterwards. As it is, simply adjusting the sliders for
red, green and blue separately and then shifting the midtone slider
for RGB gives me a great scan. With Scangear, I can either get
reasonably close colour with a lot of clipping (which means I then
introduce more clipping when I adjust the colour balance) or I can get
scans with the headroom I need but that are really out in terms of the
colour balance (I had pink/magenta snow in one slide).
> NO, NO, better than that! You can batch scan the whole 30 frames into
> separate files, RAW and/or TIFF and/or JPEG, all at once and unattended.
Yes, I didn't clearly explain this. When I say it scans 1 frame at a
time I meant I give it the list of frames to scan (like how you can
specify the rotation in the list, handy for working with film strips).
The software (either Vuescan or Scangear) then goes "okay I'm scanning
frame 1" scans frame 1, outputs it (as a file with Vuescan as an open
window with Scangear which is a major drain on memory resources when
batch scanning 30 frames) then moves to the next frame. I was
expecting it to scan the whole bed in 1 go and then split up the
files. I've thought about this some more though and realised that
would be silly, it'd be a lot of work dealing with the monster file
and the scan time would be slower because it would end up scanning a
lot of area at full res that's not going to be in any of the files.
> Nope, once you pick a film holder with multiple frames, the Batch Scan
> option boxes will appear. You have never seen them with the FS2710 (I
> know, cause I have one) because it can't do batch scanning. With the
> FS4000, which can scan a strip of 6 frames or four slides automatically,
> the VueScan input window has batch options. I just set Batch to All and
> walk away for a bit while it scans all of them into separate files. So
> get out of Mode: Flatbed and into Mode: Transparency, then select the
> proper film holder. You will find a whole new world. I told you Vue Scan
> is a complex thingie!
Yep, I've got that working. Just wasn't clear in explaining what I meant.
I've ironed out the basics now. I think I'm at a point where it's as
good as it'll get until I can do film profiles. So now I just need to
fish out my blower bulb (dust is really the enemy with a flatbed
because you've got 4 surfaces to worry about instead of 2 with a film
scanner) and get cracking on some scans. Then I can finally post some
images from my trip on my website.
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