long time :). (And I just noticed all the horrible typos in my earlier posts… I shouldn’t be typing on a phone).
Because 1) I want to save the scans unprocessed. Just as saving RAW files from a digital camera, I want to save the raw data from the scanner (which is unprocessed). Also for properly color-calibrating the scanner, I want to start without any color-space conversions done to the scan.
And for proper conversion of negatives the data needs to be linear and start without any gamma adjustment. All other tools doing negative inversions require it to be in linear-gamma. Why NLP sort of requires it the other way around, I don’t know, but as I said: I don’t use it anymore.
I always opened the raw linear TIFs in Vuescan. It has a ‘scan from raw’ option where you can open a linear tif file and you can process it through vuescan again. When you set the output file format as Vuescan’s ‘DNG’ format, it creates DNG files that work in NLP with the Minolta profiles that NLP shipped. With some trial and error you can also do it from the commandline with exiftool and ‘dng_validate’ from the DNG SDK.
If I would want to use the tif function from NLP, I would just run all the files through imagemagick before hand, with a -evaluate pow 0.4547069271758436944937833037 to shift the gamma to the correct AdobeRGB 2.199 way. But as I said, it still feels wrong for me to do processing in gamma-corrected space.
I actually tried the DiMage scan utility again, and indeed. You can ‘multi select’ the pictures in the index-scan section, and hitting prescan / scan will then do multiple in a pass.
I do have a feeling the shadows are noisier though, but that might just be that I didn’t use the scanner in a while or the slide-film I was trying through DiMage (Which thanks to the pandemic has been sitting for a year on the shelf waiting to be developed).
I am wondering what happens when you set the focus point to different areas for different pictures, if the utility remembers that… but I often set the autofocus point to exactly the same spot on all the scans anyway (halfway between the outer edge and the center, to hopefully get everything within focus).