These are some observations from my experience with just a couple components of scanning software. I haven't tried Vuescan and I know it has a good reputation for many scanners. My experience is limited to color material in a Nikon LS-4000 and Epson 4990 with NikonScan, EpsonScan and Silverfast Ai 6.6.
About a year ago, I noticed there were some weird artifacts in my color negative images when scanning with Silverfast Ai on my Epson 4990. Basically all my color negative came out of the software looking like a watercolor filter had been applied. The colors were blocked and there was little if any gradation. I'd picked up a Nikon LS-4000 and scoffed at Silverfast's outrageous pricing on that model and had been scanning with NikonScan and noticed I wasn't seeing this in the Nikon scans.
So then I decided to take a look at EpsonScan more seriously and see if I could get better color negative results. I will say up front that scanning color negative in EpsonScan professional mode requires much more user input, an understanding or RGB and CMYK color corrections and patience to work with curves in individual color channels. However, on my first scan, I immediately noticed a difference in the quality of color gradation with color negative and was overall quite happy with the controls offered. I tried scanning a slide film in the software, like the result and never looked back. My paid license of silverfast Ai sat on the shelf.
The only downside to EpsonScan was that the on-screen previews weren't entirely accurate, so some fine color correction is required in photoshop and that it doesn't seem to correctly scan into the aRGB(1998) color space even when the settings are configured for this. I was seeing some subtle shifts in certain colors and over-exuberant greens. This seems to affect color negative scans more acutely than positive scans, but both can be impacted. The software seems to be creating an sRGB scan, then tagging it aRGB and calling it a day. Easy fix- assign color profile sRGB then convert to aRGB in Photoshop ACE.
More recently I'd noticed that my current scans seemed sharper than my old 4X5 scans done in silverfast, and I decided to take another look at this. I needed to get some old film out for a project and decided to invest a bit of time in this.
These are all 100% crops of 2400 ppi scans of slide film. All are straight out of the scan software as far as sharpness is concerned. I've done some color correction to the middle one as it acquired a bit of a red cast in the scanner.
One of my first scans done by a friend on his 4870 just before I bought my 4990.
Now in this case, both were scanned on my 4990, both are the same frame of film. This was actually a case where the silverfast watercolor effect was showing up in a slide scan and I wanted smoother detail in the grasses. The yellow leaves really stood out to me in this example.
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