Vuescan Miscropping Issue. Anyone Else?

[Brent Long]

Firstly, yes, I have already emailed Ed about this. His initial, and quite incorrect in my opinion, response was that it was a hardware issue with my scanner head not starting the scan from the correct initial position.

I'm using an Epson GT-X900 (Japanese version of V700) scanner and the issue is that the crop preview does not correlate to what the actual scan is producing. It is not a shift, i.e. the whole crop moves slightly to another area of the film, but it is including extra space on one end only. This indicates that it is not simply the scanner not realigning correctly for the full scan.

Additionally, this is consistent. If it were a hardware issue I would expect it to vary from scan to scan, but it doesn't.




Any ideas or similar experiences?

[patrickjames]

You don't say what your operating system is which of course would help. Hint hint.

I had a cropping problem with a Nikon scanner on a new Mac running Lion and Vuescan 64bit that was fixed by running the 32bit version. You might try that.

[Brent Long]

I'm running this on a VirtualBox WinXp 32bit install inside Ubuntu 11.04. I logged into my 64bit WinXP partition to see what would happen there, however, and got the same thing.

Thanks for the idea.

[Francisco Disilvestro]

Try increasing the resolution of the preview. Vuescan defaults to "Auto", Try something around 600 dpi

[Brent Long]

Well, that pretty much solves this mystery. The preview image with "Auto" Preview Resolution, for some reason, indicates the crop marks incorrectly. Without touching the crop area, only changing the preview resolution to 800, the actual crop area, which is a fair degree bigger, is shown.

Notice how all the other crop lines are identical.




I hope Hamrick will address this as I'd rather not wait around for the higher res preview, but I'll have to for the time being.

Thanks for your help!

[rdenney]

Instead of waiting for Ed to provide the precision you desire in VueScan, why don't you crop slightly large during the scan and then do your fine cropping in Photoshop?

I generally scan to get the film image into the computer, and therefore scan a bit beyond the limits allowed by the film holder, hopefully to include a touch of the black border. I do my final cropping when I target the image to the final print size. That may vary, and that's why I don't crop the original scan.

I use VueScan with an Epson V750 myself and have never noticed this problem, but that doesn't mean it's not there. It just means I don't use VueScan for finish cropping.

Rick "thinking this will keep you from having to preview at an inconvenient resolution for scans you are doing right now" Denney

[Brent Long]

Yes, Rick, that is the workflow that I once desired, and still do really, but I have a couple of issues with it right now. I'm scanning 6x9 images at 6400 dpi, then resampling down to 2400 in PS. Even with 4GB memory, trying to do this in a virtual machine, or even via Wine under Ubuntu, is a bit taxing. I'm trying to keep the file size as small as possible, but that still means a bit over 1.5GB initial file. My cropping boxes in PS do not work smoothly at all right now, either in the VM or under Wine. I don't know why as I had never had that issue before.

Anyway, I do prefer the workflow you describe, and may just bite the bullet and do it that way regardless, but I'm hopeful for a little compromise; i.e. to be able to crop right to the edge in Vuescan and be done with that part of it. Although, slanted horizons and film placed in the holder sloppily make this a miss more than hit proposition, so . . .

Maybe my XP x64 partition still has a little life left in it afterall. It was much smoother and snappy scanning large over there seeing as the software (PS) is actually made to run in that environment natively. Trying to get something for nothing really works sometimes, if what you're after is a headache.

[Francisco Disilvestro]

I don't think this is a particular issue with Vuescan. The same thing happens with Silverfast and the Epson V700

[Noah A]

I have the same problem with my Epson 4990 and Vuescan. Interestingly it doesn't occur when I scan reflective items (papers, polaroids), it only happens with transparencies.

Personally I stoppd worrying about it since I only use the epson for the occasional preview scan if I can't decide between two negs or for scanning documents, etc.

But it is strange. I always thought it was a scanner problem.

[Brent Long]

It doesn't seem, to me, logical to conclude this as a hardware issue. Even if it were, it would "still be a software" issue. What I mean is, since it is consistent, it would be very easy, relatively, for the software developer to compensate for it.