On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:29:11 -0700 (PDT), John
wrote:

Hello.

I have just set up all my scanning software and my 8800F on my new
Win7 system.

Can you advise what settings you recommend to use for scanning both
negative colour film as well as 6x4 prints?

Is it best to disable all image corrections etc like sharpening, dust
removal, or can hardware dust removal etc help in any way?

Which software would you advise to use with my 8800F? The Canon
software, Silverfast or Photofun Studio (scangear driver)?

How do you select whether to use the full platen or to scan for
individual film negatives in the Silverfast settings?

I was thinking of scanning at 48 bit colour to Tiff files at either
2400 or 4800 dpi. Just not sure whether to use the Silverfast for this
or the Canon software.

In the Canon software I try to disable everything like sharpening and
tone but it seems to always re-enable itself e.g. the option for tone
always turns itself back to "ON" so I think I must need to find a way
to save my own settings as default.

Finally, the last thing is what do you select for the gamma setting or
would you just leave that on the default? I think mine is set to 2.2
as default.

Thanks for any advice, I am pretty much a newbie to scanning
especially film.

I use VueScan as my scanning software and I think I'm satisfied with
it, sort of.

I've been scanning negs and slides and prints for years and still
consider myself a newbie. Many mysteries remain for me.

When you print negs, the prints all have the same gamma. But when you
scan a neg, the software goes about setting black and white points,
and so every scan has a different gamma. Well, this is how it seems
anyway the way I do it. Several quite similar pics on the same roll
will come out with different contrast because the white and black
points are always a bit different.

Color balancing seems to depend on which tones are clipped by the
white point setting. Depending on the range of tones of your neg, you
may clip more or less. Usually there are specular highlights or other
highlights which might as well be clipped. But this affects the
resulting color. So similar pics on the same roll come out with
different color.

It is annoying and time consuming to tune the pics to have similar
color and contrast.

You can decide not to clip and to capture all the tones in the
original. But then the scan will (depending on tonal range) have low
contrast and will require more post-processing.

I have not had success in doing good "contact print" scans, because
the non-image areas affect the black point, and that screws up the
contrast and color.

If the Canon software will allow setting the gamma, that is something
I should look into. But just about everybody says VueScan is way
better than Canon software or the software that came with the scanner.
Film in the olden days did not have such good resolution. Quite
amazing really, how grainy it was, compared to what we expect today.
In my experience 2000 dpi is fine for most 35mm shots. If the shot is
important, then maybe go for higher res. For 120 format, a bit lower
dpi is good, again depending on how important the shot is.

I always use IR dust removal when this is possible.

Sharpening needs to be done with end-use in mind. You need different
sharpening depending on whether you will print the image or view on a
monitor. Therefore save a TIF or RAW without any sharpening and then
sharpen prior to using the image. I don't have specific advice about
settings. I just let Lightroom decide. (I use LR for post-processing.)

I wonder if you and I are the only ones on this NG.

Th