Thank you so much, James. I’ve had my Epson V700 for nearly 10 years, but have only used it a few times. I just inherited my Dad’s BW negatives from 1942 and am getting started making all the decisions that you are discussing. Fluid mount, software, etc. I know there will be a learning curve, but I appreciate your expertise to help it go as smoothly as possible. Thank you.
Thanks for watching Beth! Since making these videos I've been in a pattern of fluid mounting only those photos that are really important to me. The gains are bigger from improving techniques with the software over the stock settings then they are at the upper end of fluid mounting etc, and my main method is VueScan with the epson mounts. I'm happy that others like yourself are still finding these videos a few years after I made them, and great to hear you're all set to start scanning! I hope this helps you get great results!
James thanks Good VDOì! I just do not agree with you on same points. 1) VueScan has a very nice working option. Under the .Tif tab you have the option to reduce the size of your Dpi....If you reduce by 2 - (4400/2 = 2400) - VueScan will choose the best pixel 4you. That's great !!! 2) Under the preference tub there is a choice to bring up the histogram. Once you preview the scan you can check the light and color values. This is essential and I especially recommend to check that the highlight signal touches the far right. 3) I will never use a mylar sheet over my scan when I wet revers mount with betterscanning holder. Just tape the thin frame of your negative to the black mask. I relay loved the way you explain things. Very clear, precise and synthetic.
Hi James, I've watched countless photography videos but this video series of yours from 2018 is by far and away the most informative and easiest to follow set of videos I've seen. Thanks very much for making them, and hopefully you make a comeback in the future.
Very happy these are still being enjoyed several years after posting them! Funny thing - I refer back to them myself when it's been a while and I need a refresher ha! Easier then finding old notebooks!
Just found this video, good work. I've been using Vuescan since my HP S20 film scanner days in the 90s, It was cheap to buy and I've had inummerable new versions without paying one penny more. Great support from Ed Hamrick (the author0 too. Great software but so many options. Really well explained. Good work. I've just acquired an old Yashica TLR so I'm planning on scanning some 120 film soon.
Once completed, what do you do with the fluid mounted film? Does it require any cleaning or does the fluid simply evaporate and you can put it back in the sleeve? And can you reuse the Mylar or does it get disposed of? Thanks for the videos!
Awesome video, i definitely learned a thing or two! Looking forward to seeing the quality differences between using a fluid mount scan and Epsons plastic film holders. I'm also very much looking forward to hearing your tips on scanning color negative film, as i've had quite a difficult time myself in getting a scan that i'm satisfied with. That orange tint on color neg film is kicking my butt, especially when i'm trying to get the colors looking the way they're supposed to. The whole process had proven itself difficult and i have not been able to find a good source on youtube that covers scanning color film, as most scanning guides use b&w as their examples. I've now watched all your videos on this channel and i'm a big fan, the quality of your videos is outstanding! It really does stand out amongst other analog and photography centered youtube channels and it's great to see! :)
IsakseA thank you so much for taking the time to comment and for your ideas for future videos! It’s very encouraging to hear from people like yourself who are enjoying these and finding them useful and I appreciate you writing! Colour is by far the most requested new guide and I most certainly will be adding a video very soon. I have several new videos in production and lots of ideas for things I’d like to share so please stay tuned and I hope I can help! Colour can be frustrating at first but with the right steps it’s a lot easier.
Thanks James for your forthright tutorials, you have rekindled my interest in photography, I am already set up with all the good stuff, only needed the enthusiasm.
Fantastic series. Been great reviewing all the steps and hints in a logical and progressive series. I've been shooting soley on film for a while now and have very much evolved as per your series. Started with the Olympus Trip 35, then a Canon SLR and now medium format with half frame thrown in for fun as well. Quickly realised the cost savings and invested in a Epson V750 and have been more recently developing as well. Great tips on getting the best out of the scans. Looking forward to the rest. +1 Sub.
Thanks for the kind comment Martin. All great cameras, so much choice in film gear. Yes I've used my V700 for the best part of ten years now and it's still going strong! Appreciate the sub, more to share very soon. Thanks!
Very fine and helpful tutorial. For 35mm negative color film, would you suggest the same setttings, like Adobe RGB output, no white balance, 16 samples etc ? Sometimes my Nikon 5000 ED Scanner in conjunction with Vuescan, has a trouble previewing the frames properly, instead it cuts them in almost half and I have to edit them and paste them manually in Photoshop. Any idea why that happens and if so, is there a solution to this anomaly ?
Thanks for watching Antonios, glad you enjoyed the video. I'd say yes - always good to start out with the widest possible capture settings so you have an acquisition scan that you can later do anything you like with. That said, if you're simply scanning a batch of negatives to back up old photos and want to prioritise scan times over marginal quality gains, you can experiment with lowering these values and see how things look. To your question about the Nikon scanner, I'm afraid I'm not familiar with this hardware, but I know that Hamrick at VueScan was very quick to reply to any tech questions I had and is constantly updating your software with free lifetime upgrades, so there's a good chance he can help you out there. Do you have the same issues when using the native scanner software, out of curiosity? All the best and thanks again!
@@JamesStevensonPhoto Sorry for the late reply James. I can no longer use the native Nikon software since it is no longer supported by either Nikon itself nor be the latest Mac OSX updates, but when I used to use it, I had no issues with it. I'll try contacting Hamrick for more help to this specific preview and scanning problem. Thanks a lot again for your help.
@@AntoniosPapantoniou Sorry to hear about that Antonios. Did you try emailing Hamrick at VueScan? I'm sure he'd be happy to try and resolve your cropped frame issues - the software is still updated very frequently, much to my surprise! I think it's a labour of love on his part! www.hamrick.com/support/ Try this link, and let me know how you get on!
@@JamesStevensonPhoto Thanks a lot James ! I will check the link and send them an e-mail. I did a scan today and the film seemed to work out fine except for a few preview glitches. I'll give it more tests. Kind regards.
one question, having looked at the previous video about wet_mounting as well, you don't say if this will work for 4x5",5x7" or 8x10" sheet film, as for most people these scanners only scan 35 mm or 120 medium format roll style films, so I ask do these scanners or the company you got the glass frame from, make adaptors for sheet film?, and what scanner do you suggest for these LF shooters to upload their films.
Best video for scanning I've ever seen!! Is there a way to do the process without wet mounting? What if you put down a strip of ANR (from Better Scanning) glass over the neg instead? Wouldn't you get the same result? Thank you
nice video, but one good topic would be to compare this wet_mount\vuescan image inkjet or pro printed version with traditional darkroom printing, aka on ilford paper and see how they compare.
Very informative video, i've been looking so much for something like this. So basically shooting with a 38mp camera such for example the Nikon d800 produce a better image in terms of resolution than shooting with a medium format film camera?
thanks for the nice video. One question, though: is there a reason why you didn't set any film profile in the color tab? I mean those vendor, brand and type options which are supposed to contain profiles for the particular film.
Good question. I have experimented with those, they're innacurate and no longer get updated and I find they just through unpredictable contrast / exposure adjustments into the mix. I prefer to do it manually and also prefer ColorPerfect plugin for colour adjustments. I'll post a video on that soon!
Great video. Question, why do you scan as a TIFF instead of a RAW TIFF? Is there a difference? I have adopted ColorPerfect into my workflow and I have to feed it a negative and I know it the same for NLP.
Nice tutorial. thank you. i just started to do fluidscan. my mainproblem is how to efficiently celan the negatives from the scanning fluid. it's allways a mess and i starte to wash in water. but its soo mess. how do you suggest to clean the negatives from ths scan gel?
Thanks Marcel! May I ask, are you using the same Kami brand fluid? When I use it there's no clean up, it just evaporates quickly and your negatives are dry again very quickly afterwards. I'm not sure what it's made up of, but it's very thin, not a gel. Is yours like that?
Dear James, as for Media settings, correct me if I wrong, some sources (Veuscan bible one of them, but i'm not sure) advice to choose Color positive in order to get as much as possible from any film no matter what it is. As far as I understand its due flatbed scanner technology limitations. In output what the difference between TIFF vs RAW? Do you use Lock Exposure?
Sorry for the late reply Victor! it is, they will clamp into these holders, though it'll be more fiddly and harder to get them flat. With the glass, the edges can be taped to the glass plate which would help, but that's the more expensive solution.
When scanning color slides, would it still be best on the color tab to pull the curve high/curve low settings to 0.001, or should this only to be applied for B/W?
Hello! I am using the Epsons Wet mount with kami fluid and mylar but I don't get any images when scanning 35mm, it's all black, the scanner just does not find the negatives. I have tried both Epson Scan and SilverFast 8. Both should work. I am not using a mask since this is the first time i see anyone recommend using that. Do you think that the scanner might not be able to find the negatives because there is no mask or is there another error? This is using 35mm film, for some strange reason it does find my 110mm film...
Hey James, thank you for this video! Do you know how to change the scan area? I am having trouble getting my scanner to scan the actual image. My scanner continues to scan the area of my film holder assuming I am shooting medium format, but my film is sitting in the 35mm holder.
Hi James! Great tutorial! I have a question: everytime I scan, the white area of the negative is not "absolute" black like the glass background, but it's always "foggy"...I found info about it and looks like you need to block the exposure selecting the supposed black area of the negative, so the scanner "understands" that that area should be black and not grey...Do you know anything about it? D you know if this is going to affect the scanned picture? Thanks!
Hi Alfredo, thanks for watching and for your question. I'd suggest always scanning a little of the border of the negative as you can always trim a little afterwards. Also play around with your 'buffer' settings under the input tab - this controls how much of an area inside the 'marching ants' of you selection box is used by the auto-exposure setting of the software and can lead to some varied results. A but of experimentation should get you where you need. If this didn't accurately answer your question, please send me an example. Thanks again!
Thanks James. Please see an example here: imgur.com/Kf9NHI8 . As you can see, there's a difference between zone 1 and 2, with 1 more black than 2. In this case, zone 1 represents a portion of the scanner glass, while zone 2 is the scanned film negative. Now, what you see is just a x1 scan with a 'Multiple Exposure' option on, so I didn't try a x16 scan as you suggested yet. What do you think about it? Why does the black of the negative appear so flat/foggy compared to the real black of the scanner glass? As I said in my message above, it works fine when you block the exposure...but you don't seem to that to reach a fine result...Thanks in advance for your interest!
Do you have, or any plans to make, a tutorial for Vuescan w/ Epson flatbed scanners, but using the 35mm slide template? I can't figure this out to save my life & it's driving my insane. :(
i have a epson 3200 and bought the software a few weeks ago, but i m so disapointed with it. I have set my settings to as close as i can following your video but my latest scan is still crap, muddy, no pow, just not good enough. Whats going on
Hmm. MultiExposure on VueScan affects the highlights on negative films, not the 'shadows.' It helps when you have very dense negatives by applying more time to the second scan, giving the sensor more light to read as it penetrates the dense grain clusters. My extensive testing indicates no benefit from ME except for those very dense areas of the negative, usually due to over exposure or over development. Think of ME as HDR photography, as two readings will be merged such that thin areas from one image and thick areas from the second image will be merged into one image.
christophe claire hi there - some steps are similar but there are some additional things to consider when working with colour that I will walk through in a new video coming very soon.
Good question; I've not found a compelling reason to scan raw .DNG. For colour I use a plugin for photoshop called colorperect, that works from the 'raw' tiff data that the scanner puts out and actually requests that you save in the tiff format. I've yet to find any benefit for DNG in this context. I'm always experimenting with the best solutions though and if I discover anything new, it'll pop up on this channel. I've been scanning this way for around 3-4 years now so I think soon it'll be time to review the process again. I'd like to try out the high resolution mode on the OM-D EM-5ii with a macro lens for 35mm especially... I've seen interesting results online and I use that camera regularly so watch this space!
3:30 No... you don't have to check if your scanner drivers are installed. The Vuescan software *is* the driver. You don't see the scanner, it's not supported or plugged in/recognized properly.
Interesting to hear Fernando and thanks for watching. Which settings do you use, and how do they compare? When fluid mounting I've tended to feel that I'm already doing something that's quite slow and deliberate, so I just crank the scan settings to the max - that said I'm always keen to hear if something is just not worthwhile! Like hiking the resolution to the max, for instance, I know that doesn't yield better results. Appreciate the kind words too, thanks!
SilverFast only does two passes when multi exposure is active, that should be a clue. I doubt more passes are worth the time. Like HDR in digital photography: two is enough and I three is plenty. I wouldn't go beyond that (I haven't done any extensive test, but I haven't seen any great benefits compared to the time wasted). Great picture, by the way.
Please stop selecting outside the image area. When you select outside the image area you will get scans that are flat but the highlights will always be blown out.
Hi John - I have to say that this isn't the case with the correct setup of VueScan. Under the Crop tab, there are two settings labelled "Border (%)" and "Buffer (%)". Border controls additional physical crop that happens inside your selection on the final image (I always leave set to 0 ), Buffer controls the area of the film the software is using to measure exposure. You can see this by experimenting with the value; if set to Zero, the software uses the entire frame including the black border. If set to 5% or greater, it ignores that percentage of the area inside your selection. This serves to ensure your exposure is calculated on the actual image if you like to select the frame border as I do. If for instance you set this to 90% it would only calculate exposure based around measurement of the central 10% of the frame. Those settings are here in the video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0Z1lqfidIQ4.htmlm43s Indeed if you prefer to select inside the frame border you can set this to zero as it's not needed, but if - like me - you like to include the border as part of the final scan, you can use this buffer setting to get accurate measurements. This way anyone can do as they wish and get great results. Hope this is useful and thanks for watching!
Interesting Gregg, I'd be interested to know if it's any specific part? I've researched long and hard to get the best settings for RU-vid uploads, my end it looks crisp with little-to-no compression artifacts. I've used H.264 80,000KB/S constant bit rate which gives a good balance between quality and file size, are you definitely watching at 1080p? For video mastering on PC - professional delivery for clients - I use Avid DNxHR which is windows equivalent to Apple ProRes. To use that for RU-vid videos creates a very long upload time and uses a lot of bandwidth though. I know that H264 is lossy, I never use it to master or as a precursor to colour grading, but it makes sense to use a very high quality H264 render to upload to RU-vid. I also know RU-vid compression can be pretty brutal, but there's no controlling that part! Anyone else seeing poor quality video, I'd like to know!
