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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45

I am just starting to use your software with an Epson V850. I followed the above directions but I keep running into a problem with the cropping of my film. I realize this is probably an Epson Scan (v 3) problem, but I am hoping you may have a suggestion to correct it. I am using the Epson 35mm strip holder and when I preview the image it crops it wrong. When I crop it as a Transparency, the preview shows about 3/4 of the target image and the remaining is the frame next to it. The odd thing is if I set the software to scan it as a color negative, it previews properly.

Any suggestions?

46

Thanks a lot for sharing your whole process, Nate. I haven’t used my V600 in about three years, and I really wish I had documented my workflow back then. There are quite a few steps involved, so seeing yours laid out like this is really helpful. :folded_hands:

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