[vladimiroltean]

Hi there. I'm mostly new at photography of any sort, let alone film photography. I have a Canon Lide 700F scanner, which I know is not the best of film scanners, but my dad bought it to scan his youth pictures and now I'm using it for my own. It took me quite a lot to get used to it and how it works, what software works best for it, but now I have issues with the sharpness I get from it. More specifically, there seems to be a "hot spot" in resolution at about 2000 dpi where the sharpness is a little better, but at higher resolutions the image gets all fuzzy and there's strange bands all over. Also I have found out that the original Canon software scans much sharper than Vuescan. I have attached a sample picture that has focused right, but appears soft. What's wrong?

Attached Images

 

[tuco]

One approach is to turn off all scanner software augmentation except ICE. Adjust the scan to bring in all the tones it can with 48-bit color. Your resulting scan will be dull and fuzzy. Adjust tones, contrast and color in an image editor. Resize the image for output and finally apply your sharpening techniques in the image editor.

VueScan can output you a TIFF-DNG file. You can open that up in something like Lightroom. There you can adjust the image. And you can even further edit it in Photoshop with Lightroom changes (Photo->Edit in->Photoshop) which has a much better healing tool to take care of dust and imperfections. Save the file and changes show up in Lightroom. Go back to Lightroom and you can apply some sharpening and noise reduction to taste and then export to, say, screen with choice of medium or high sharpening and you'll as good or better results as sharpening by hand in Photoshop unless you're really good at sharpening in Photoshop.

This shot is Portra 400 scanned with VueScan and only edited in Lightroom.

[vladimiroltean]

Wow, I could only dream of that much detail. Here's what I do: scan the negative with the bundled application as if it were a slide, no automatic sharpening, noise reduction, dust removal, color adjustment whatsoever, then I invert the colors and remove the (now) blue mask in Photoshop. I know that my scanner can do infrared, Vuescan can make use of it, but it seems unavailable through Canon's interface. Same goes with 48-bit colors. Sharpening has always seemed to me to give brutal results. Maybe I was trying to correct an image too soft, or I don't know how to use it properly.
I don't like about Vuescan the waterslide on the final images telling me to buy the product, I won't buy something that failed to convinge me in the first place.

[artobest]

The sharpness of your scan looks alright to me, judging by the dust spots, which appear well defined. Maybe the photo itself is a little soft? I don't know what's happening with the discoloration on the edges.

Any flat-bed film scan is going to need a lot of capture sharpening. It doesn't have to look brutal. Generally, sharpening is a crucial part of all digital imaging, especially where analog-to-digital conversions are taking place, as softness always creeps in. Do your sharpening on a duplicate layer and use a custom blend to protect your shadows and highlights. Then adjust the opacity until it looks right.

If you don't have a special plug-in such as Photokit Sharpener, then try Photoshop's Smart Sharpen. Use the Lens Blur setting, with More Accurate checked, as this gives you a basic Deconvolution algorithm that deblurs soft images, and can give pretty good results.

I did take the liberty of using some of the aforementioned techniques along with a little local contrast enhancement on your image, and got pretty good results, but for some reason the forum isn't allowing me to upload an image right now .

[vladimiroltean]

Yeah, I hope you'll manage to upload that file, but in the meantime here's another photo scanned from Agfa Vista 400 film. The quality is really bad (ignoring the dust specks, I can't get rid of them). What the heck is going wrong?

[tuco]

Gee, it is really hard to judge the quality of an image when the picture is a reflection.

To fix dust specs, clean the scanner glass and negative the best you can and use either the ICE or inferred cleaning feature in the scanning software if your scanner supports it. Or simply edit the picture with an image editor using the healing tool. Works wonders. With BW negatives, you can't use ICE and so us BW scanners have to go in and fix dust all the time in the image editor.

[vladimiroltean]

I'm still waiting for that sharpened picture..
Anyway, does anybody know how to access infrared cleaning and 48-bit scanning on the original software for the Canon 700F?

[stevebrot]

I'm still waiting for that sharpened picture..
Anyway, does anybody know how to access infrared cleaning and 48-bit scanning on the original software for the Canon 700F?

I don't believe that the 700F has Digital ICE or similar IR dust/scratch removal system. As for the 48-bit scanning, I would suspect that is the default capture mode with a step down to 24-bit if saved to JPEG.


Steve

[vladimiroltean]

I'm pretty sure it has the capability though - there was a button in Vuescan that did exactly this, but as I mentioned before, I'm not satisfied with the quality of scans made by Vuescan.

[stevebrot]

I'm pretty sure it has the capability though - there was a button in Vuescan that did exactly this, but as I mentioned before, I'm not satisfied with the quality of scans made by Vuescan.

The Vuescan feature is implemented in software and works for all scanners, even those without an IR channel. Your Canon may have IR dust removal as an undocumented feature, but I don't believe I would want to wager much on that possibility


Steve

[vladimiroltean]

I really can't figure out how to work around all these crappy settings on my scanner. I guess that in the end I'm going to have my images scanned.

[vladimiroltean]

OK now I will hijack my own thread, I want to know how to properly adjust the color balance for a picture. I scan the positive, reverse it in Photoshop and add a "Levels" layer. But the color balance is not always dead centre, it may need adjusting for individual channels to the left or to the right. I don't always get to the right colors using this method.

[artobest]

The first thing to do is adjust colours as best you can at the scan stage. Tell the scanner to scan the neg as positive, and set the black and white point for each channel individually - you may need to leave a bit of headroom at either end as the scanning software's histogram may not be all that precise. Then, when you import into PS and invert, you will have a pretty good basis for further tinkering using PS's adjustment layers: Levels, Curves, Selective Colour, Hue/Saturation, etc. And don't forget to scan as 16-bit (48-bit colour), to allow for tweaking without banding or posterization.

[vladimiroltean]

Canon be damned for such an AWFUL scanning software. How the f should I access 48 bit scanning and assure that the software does nothing to modify the image?