Buying Color Perfect Vs farting around with vuescan?

[Atracksler]

Im just starting scanning my C41 negatives. Ive gotten great B/W Results with vuescan, but I'm not thrilled with the color.

Should I just bite the bullet and get Color Perfect for converting the negatives? or is there a more efficient vuescan workflow?

[Pali K]

Try the free version which will add lines to your scan but at least you'll know what to expect.

I find color perfect to be the best and it is near flawless in all auto mode for ektar. I have to tweak Portra a bit afterwards but it comes really close.

Pali

[richardman]

See my post just yesterday on my experience on using Silverfast.

[SergeyT]

Everything that color perfect does can be relatively easy replicated by curves in PS. CP is just a plugin which uses the data loaded into PS.
Use it on a copy of your neg scanned as positive in demo to produce a reference if you wish and then invert your original and go for the same look with a few curves layers - one for dark point, one for white point, one for tones and one for white balance fine tuning.

SergeyT.

[Kirk Gittings]

Everything that color perfect does can be relatively easy replicated by curves in PS. CP is just a plugin which uses the data loaded into PS.
Use it on a copy of your neg scanned as positive in demo to produce a reference if you wish and then invert your original and go for the same look with a few curves layers - one for dark point, one for white point, one for tones and one for white balance fine tuning.

SergeyT.

I tested this years ago and came to the same conclusion. Maybe it does something special now?

[alkklab]

Color Perfect plugin has significantly improved my scans. Scanning raw in Vuescan and then converting Portra 160 with it, the negatives are are almost always looking good with minimal photoshop corrections. Never had luck working with Silverfast.

[adelorenzo]

Yes I have found the color conversion in Color Perfect to be really good and sometimes better than what I can manage on my own. However, I rarely use it because of what it does to my workflow.

My normal workflow looks like this:

1. Scan with Epson scan software, individual frames -> TIFF
2. Import into Lightroom
3. Edit as desired
4. Export

Using Color Perfect, it starts to look like this:

1. Scan with Vuescan, strips of frames -> Raw TIFF (Because Vuescan sucks so badly at scanning multiple frames)
2. Open with Photoshop Elements, crop each individual frame and put it into a new file
3. Run ColorPerfect on each file
4. Save each file as TIFF
5. Import into Lightroom
6. Edit as desired
7. Export

Steps 2-4 are incredibly time consuming. I hate digital editing to begin with so I rarely bother.

[Preston]

I tried Color Perfect some time ago and found it fiddly. When I do scan color neg (w/VueScan) I check each of the installed profiles to see which looks best and then save the TIFF file. Once in Photo Shop, I save the file a *.PSD.

Works for me.

--P

[rbultman]

Check out the Vuescan advanced workflow for establishing the film base color for color negative film. It works well and does a good job removing the case colour.

Vuescan does suck at scanning multiple frames even on my LS-8000. The original Nikon software was very good and could automatically find the frames in a strip of 120. Not sure why Vuescan can't. It also doesn't handle inconsistent spacing on 120. I pretty much scan one frame at a time, except for 35mm.

[towolf]

Vuescan does suck at scanning multiple frames even on my LS-8000.

I recently used a Nikon CoolScan 9000 in an art academy, which only had SilverFast on an OSX box. *That* was horrible regarding frames and batching. So much time wasted!

VueScan scanning long rolls of 35mm on a Nikon CoolScan 4000 can be done fully batched, but with black borders left and right. The frame detection goes wrong every so often and would scan a frame with a black bar on one side. I now just scan with maximum width in the preview and crop the bars later in Adobe Camera Raw plugin. In ACR just crop them all with the proper width and then shift the crop box left and right in each one for compensate for inconsistent spacing. Goes very fast.

I’ve tried a lot of stuff but in the end I settled on the "Lock exposure" + "Lock Film Base color" zeroing method and in Output save as 48-bit TIFF (with Gamma). Then just edit the files with ACR or Lightroom. The TIFFs will be kept as "originals" and the edits are stored non-destructively. Early on I wanted to have linear files (with no Gamma) and tried "RAW TIFF" and "RAW DNG", but somehow Adobe would always interpret them wrong (too dark).