Scanning Film Negatives with Epson Scan and Negative Lab Pro

Flatbed and Film Scanners Epson Scan
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Hi Nate,
Been playing with my Epson V850 and your suggestions above and finally think I have cracked the use of color profiles and Digital ICE. The color profiles are made with the bundled i1Profiler software and target. Using this technique the colors seem to come out much better (“natural”) and with a more consistent rendition. Steps:

  1. Profile your scanner using the i1Profiler software and 4x5 target - when you do this choose “No color correction” in the Epson Scan configuration box.
  2. Relaunch Epson Scan and go back to the configuration box - select the ICM checkbox and under Source (Scanner) select the profile you just made and set Target to Adobe RGB (not sure if this setting is important or not, but it is the color space I use in Lightroom. You can now activate Digital ICE (I tend to leave all the other settings untouched)
  3. When scanning, in the File Save settings, turn OFF “Embed ICC profile” under Options
  4. Crop borders in Lightroom and process in NLP
    This seems to work extremely well for me - despite profiling the scanner in Vuescan, I found the images produced by Vuescan just “didn’t look right” (from a color perspective).
    Hope these ideas might save people from hours of frustration and experimentation!
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