I have just gotten myself a new CoolScan 5000ED to process my freshly developed rolls of 90% colour Kodak Vision3 - 10% Ilford BW FP4. I also have a few dozen unscanned rolls that are waiting for a suitable, automated process.
I would prefer to use Nikon Scan 4, as some of my film is quite dusty/scratched, but I have systematically struggled with framing the pictures. The scanner easily finds each frame in negative mode, which isn’t of much use for me as I’d rather use NLP. In positive mode, I have to play with the frame offset and refresh the previews to get correct framing, which works for the first pictures, but doesn’t for the end of the roll, as the offset goes out of range. This would take an exaggerated amount of time too.
I tried drawing black 36mm lines on a blank roll of film, but it didn’t trick the scanner to align the frames correctly. VueScan has a separate “Frame alignment” option which does wonders, but it doesn’t remove scratches as well as Nikon Scan.
Has anyone found a workaround for this issue? I’d really appreciate some help.
Thank you for your reply.
“New” might be an exaggeration for some gear that was built 22 years ago
The frame alignment works well in negative mode in Nikon Scan, and in all modes in VueScan, so I would believe this issue is software-related.
Nikon Scan’s dust removal seems to be good, but it does not align frames correctly, Vuescan does, but with less thorough dust removal. So you can choose between two ways that have their relative weaknesses. Which way is the one that costs you less (work, nerves…) and might therefore be preferable?
Do you use the Strip film adapter SA-21 or do you do it one by one?
I never had this issue with the 5000.
As for the scratch removal I found Nikon Scan 4 too harsh, forcing me to work on topo many pieces of dust or scratch, even the tiniest of all.
For what it’s worth I have this exact same issue with the CoolScan 5000 and Nikon Scan. So it’s not just you! I’m using the SA-21 film strip adapter. I also prefer nikon scan for the Digital ICE dust removal, as well as the ability to capture thumnails to get the alignment right in a fraction of the time it takes for get a preview. Vuescan can’t do the “thumbnail” function at all. My guess would be NikonScan is pretty old software, and it’s looking for certain color/brightness transitions to align the frames when in negative mode, and looking for different ones when in positive mode, and running negatives through in positive mode confuses it a little. I usually have to offset each successive frame by amount +4 from the one before it.
My rolls are all sliced up into 4 frame strips, so it’s able to handle that many per batch, but I don’t know how it would behave for a single continuous roll, which is probably what you’re dealing with. I know of no fix for this other than slicing up your film, i’m sorry.
Oh that’s reassuring, I’ve brought the scanner from Europe to Vietnam, and having it fixed might be challenging.
I tried to trick NikonScan by drawing black frame lines on an empty roll of film, to emulate the look of a roll of positive, but it didn’t work. I wish there was a way to acquire the thumbnails in negative mode then do the scans in positive mode.
I’m having a bigger offset, and it becomes too big for an entire 40 frames roll. I’ll have to cut them, losing some of the advantage of bulk scanning.
I don’t use Vuescan tat I find limited and clumsy for this kind of operaiton. I tried Affinity Team that claimed to be able to work from the CoolScan 5000 but I was never able to find how.
So I stick to NikonScan4 which imposes me to keep a Windows XP computer, although all my gear is in Apple
Windows XP is quite vintage
I just scanned a few rolls with VueScan. I somehow can’t get it to batch scan without doing the previews (much slower than NikonScan thumbnails) otherwise it would only scan small parts of the pictures. At least that’s faster than changing the offset of every frame.
Comparing the files from NikonScan and VueScan didn’t make me go back.
I am really happy with how the colours turned out using NLP, I much prefer them to the scans I had done at a lab.
Are you using any gain in the green and blue channels to cancel the red base? I see people using Red 1, Green 2, and blue 3. I tried, but ended preferring the look without gain.
Use SilverFast 9 for Nikon. It finds frames correctly and it supports infra-red (IR) dust and scratch removal. If the scanner you are using doesn’t support IR, SilverFast also has another dust and scratch remover that also works effectively - both are better than ICE. It is not cheap software, but it gets the job done properly. SilverFast allows you to scan to either retain the photo as negative or convert to positive using its Negafix function, which also works very well once the correct film is selected and sometimes with a bit of fine-tuning, which it also supports. Outside of NLP it’s the best scanner-related conversion sofrware I ever used. Full disclosure: I wrote the book on this software (available on PhotoPXL.com - Shop), for the previous version SilverFast 8, and I did that because I really liked the software in the days when I was still using scanners for film digitizing, and they needed a good book on the subject. Nowadays I use NLP because I digitize with a Sony a7r4. (I should add that in my film scanning days I also used a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED, which was/is a very good scanner. Before that I used a Minolta Scan Elite 5400, which was better, but very slow. Both worked very well with SilverFast,
Although useful with flatbed scanners like Epson850 I find Silverfast’s function buttons and workflow rather obscure and clumsy. Like you I used the 5000ED, first with the nikon software that alas was abandoned by Nikon so used Vuescan.
I recently versed into the Valoid system. Painstaking setting but once done I though it was pretty fluid. Couple with NLP
Depending on which version of SilverFast you have, my book provides, by all feedback I’ve received, a comprehensive explanation and sets of instructions on the complete use of the application including how to coordinate it with (previous versions) of Lightroom and Photoshop. While this book has not been updated for years, and therefore discounted accordingly, the basics remain relevant. You would find it here: https://photopxl.com/product/scanning-workflows-with-silverfast-8-silverfast-hdr/. The Index is a free download so you can examine what you would get before buying.
