Originally Posted by
Sasquatchian
Having scanned color negs with a variety of hardware and software combinations, I can say without hesitation that they both make a huge impact on your final scan quality. And if you're using inferior hardware AND crappy software, well, it's just a big waste of your time.
The absolute best color (and black and white) neg scanning software I've ever used is Trident for the Howtek drum scanners. There is nothing else I've found that comes close, but it's not an intuitive path until and unless you have a complete understanding the digital imaging principles, the most basic of which are how to properly set your highlight and shadow points.
The Alex Burke tutorial is filled with misinformation starting with his settings of using a non color managed gamma 1.8 choice and his final scan is just mediocre in quality. I'd say you'd be worse off following his advice that trying to figure it out on your own.
One of the dirty little secrets of neg scanning is that you actually can use pretty much any good color transparency scanner profile as a point of reference when scanning color negs, assuming, of course, your software will let you use one in neg scanning mode. Since you're always working visually anyway, it's very important to use a well calibrated and profiled monitor and that you scanning software actually uses the monitor profile to display (notice that Alex has this option unchecked). You generally start with an auto ranging command that finds and sets the white and black points to neutral automatically. There is often a clipping control available as well, and you need to be able to override the auto neutral results when you know you want a color cast in the highlights or the shadows.
When you're working on a color neg scan AND you have both a monitor profile and an input profile in the display path, you can then use that input profile as the source for your conversion to your working space and you will have a fully color managed color neg workflow. If your scanning software allows you to convert to working space on the fly you can use that feature. On Trident, that feature is broken, so I always just embed the scanner profile and convert in Photoshop, which is both faster and gives me the option to choose whatever is the most appropriate working space for a particular image.
It took me years to get really good at scanning color negs, and that was with the best hardware and software out there. You need to have patience and really understand all of the control options available in whatever software package you're using. Good luck.
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