To do so, I compared Epson Scan 3.9.3.4 – which comes bundled with the company's Perfection-series photo scanners and seems nicely representative of manufacturer-supplied software – with two of the most popular third-party alternatives, LaserSoft Imaging's SilverFast SE Plus 8.8.0r22 and Hamrick Software's VueScan Professional Edition 9.7.35. If you're like me, you probably still have years' worth of unscanned slides and negatives waiting to be tended to some rainy day, and a COVID lockdown gives you a golden opportunity.īut are you better off using the software that came with your scanner, or should you shell out for a third-party alternative to get the best results? Before I rolled up my sleeves and started scanning, I wanted to answer this question for myself.

auto-software sharpening increases grain and noise, and dust-redustion and everything fancy is also off.A difficult 2020 that has blended into a difficult 2021 has made it harder for many of us to get outside and shoot, but that doesn't mean you have to neglect your photography. I'll sharpen my own stuff using this method (or a similar variant). Also, I have 'Unsharp mask' in the scanning software turned definitively OFF. OK, so no points for artistic merit, first on the roll to check the light-reading. Once i've decided what's 'good' I'll do a proper wet-mount scan at 3200dpi for a 40MP file, sharpen and whatnot on that one). (I only scan 120 film at 1600dpi initially, keeps the filesize down to 10MP or so. Here's a 100% crop at 1600dpi, absolutely no noise in the black (in the shadows or film border): If i was particular about this shot, i'd go back and re-scan with the whitepoint down a bit to get more info and stretch the info a bit more. You can see here that the white-point was maybe set a bit high when scanning, so i've pushed the whites up a bit in the curves. Once it's scanned, check the curves and do a final tweak: Set the gamma to min (0, highest contrast), set the whitepoint to just above where it clips highlights:

Set the gamma to max (5, lowest contrast), White point to min (brightest), set the blackpoint to the lowest where it looks 'black' enough, but doesn't muddy everything else: Here's some screenshots of what I do, different equipment probably, but this illustrates what I do using my Epson v750 on ImageScan! for Linux under GIMP with the epkowa driver (ymmv). You've got the black point set up too high, just like pushing shadows from a raw-file, you'll end up with noise.

Vuescan epson v600