Has anyone ever managed a satisfactory transparency scan from a Canoscan 5000F?

[Rowan Crowe]

I've had this scanner for about a year and I am still wrestling with
it. Scans of negs have never been that crash hot, which is to be
expected since Canon's driver doesn't have any compensation for
differences in film tint over different brands and types of film. The
documentation doesn't mention this either.

Positives are a bit better, but colours are still quite different when
compared to a scan on a dedicated film scanner.

My main gripe is that the scanner seemed to have problems with shadows
in both negs and posis, with darker areas suddenly "blacking out" as
if I had deliberately set the black point too high and clipped out
some of the shadows. I recently switched the colour settings in the
Canoscan driver from "Recommended" to "Canon Colorgear Color Matching"
which has made a remarkable difference on both negs and posis. On a
particularly difficult neg with deep shadows and almost-overexposed
highlights on a face the shadow detail is now much greater without
blowing the highlights. However, scanning that neg with those colour
settings now introduces a very strange cyan overlay. I won't call it a
cast since it's not a gradual tonal change, it is like someone has
gone and digitally painted over certain areas that would never have
bright cyan in them anyway... for example human skin, or part of a
tree trunk!

Just for fun I did told the scanner I had a posi loaded, but it was
really the same negative. I inverted the image and then fiddled around
with levels, which resulted in a decent looking image with the right
mix of colours, and deep shadows and good highlights. In fact to me it
looks like the best scan of this neg so far, which isn't logical at
all.

I have searched before and I haven't seen many people mention these
sorts of problems with transparencies on the Canoscan flatbed range
before. Are we all suffering in silence or am I just unlucky?

FWIW: currently using XP Home plus Photoshop CS.

 

[Rowan Crowe]

I'm posting a self-followup here in case someone comes across it in
the future and wants to know the solution:

I don't think that this is technically the right thing to do, but it
seems to have solved my problem. I associated the AdobeRGB profile
with the scanner. Previously it had the sRGB profile associated with
it. There were 4 ICM profiles installed with the scanner but none of
them (including the "Canoscan 5000F positive transparency" one)
provide a realistic output, without odd colour casts or "cyan
overpainting" as described in my original article.

This is my setup now:


Windows XP Home

Adobe Photoshop CS (version 8) using AdobeRGB as the working space

Scanner->Settings->Preferences->Settings 2->Enable 48/16 bit output
Scanner->Settings->Color Settings: Canon Colorgear Color Matching
Scanner->Main->Select source: Colour Posi Film
Scanner->Main->Color Mode: Color(48 bit)


The colour balance is still a little different to scans done on a
properly matched system, but the output is clean: shadow detail is
significantly better and there's no odd artifacts. The only problem
remaining is the muddy edges, but since it's a desktop scanner that's
going to be a hard one. ;-)

Hope this helps someone in the future.