Vuescan: problem with auto cropping color negative film strips on LS-5000

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ed Lusby
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E

Ed Lusby

I've been using the LS-5000 for a few months now with slides, and the
auto cropping works very well. However, when I use Vuescan with color
negatives, there is always a black strip at one end or the other. When
there was a few millimeters of blank film at the leading end, it left
a band of black at that end in the final scan. I cut this extra film
off, and it started leaving the black at the other end. I really can't
take the time for manual cropping of each image. Is there something I
need to do other than to check "auto position" and set crop size to
"auto"?

Ed
 
Ed Lusby said:
I've been using the LS-5000 for a few months now with slides, and the
auto cropping works very well. However, when I use Vuescan with color
negatives, there is always a black strip at one end or the other. When
there was a few millimeters of blank film at the leading end, it left
a band of black at that end in the final scan. I cut this extra film
off, and it started leaving the black at the other end. I really can't
take the time for manual cropping of each image. Is there something I
need to do other than to check "auto position" and set crop size to
"auto"?
Click to expand...

Ed:

Seems you are having problems with the VueScan Input Tab | Frame
offset feature. Check the VS User's Guide for details. VueScan uses
a different method of finding the frames than NikonScan. This is a
long standing problem and Ed has it on his TO DO List. Based on a
recent response, Ed has moved it closer to the top.

Jeff Randall
 
Thanks, Jeff. I naively thought auto cropping was just that. However,
it doesn't seem to work on auto for either Nikonscan or Vuescan
(although the Nikonscan was pretty close, it still produced a stripe
outside the image). One would think that this would be a trivial
thing for a scanner to do, given the greater complexity of the other
tasks. One would think that the best way to accomplish the auto crop
is to do a very quick scan of the entire strip (which I think
Nikonscan does to produce the thumbnails, no?). It should be trivial
to write a program delineating "clear" and image containing areas and
have the scanner initialize according to the results of this thumbnail
scan. Of course, things are always trivial when someone else is doing
it.
Hopefully, Ed H. can get to this issue in the near future. He's been
great sorting out a few other problems with the LS-5000.

Ed Lusby
 
Ed Lusby said:
I've been using the LS-5000 for a few months now with slides, and the
auto cropping works very well. However, when I use Vuescan with color
negatives, there is always a black strip at one end or the other. When
there was a few millimeters of blank film at the leading end, it left
a band of black at that end in the final scan.
Click to expand...

You need to use the "Input|Frame offset" option to get rid of the
black band.

Also, I've been working all day yesterday and today on improving the
auto-cropping algorithm in VueScan. It's working pretty well, and now
I'm testing it with hundreds of different types of raw scan files to
make sure it's robust.

I hope to release this tomorrow.

Regards,
Ed Hamrick
 
Thanks, Ed! An improvement would be much appreciated. I've worked the
past 3 days to get a manageable work flow for film strip scanning with
the Nikon LS-5000, and have given up. Nikonscan takes forever by the
time you go through a thumbnail scan, preview scan, crop, and final
scan. I thought I was missing something, but Nikon tech support could
offer no shorter way. Using Vuescan, I just couldn't get proper
cropping consistently no matter what offsets I used. It may be the
design of the machine.
Fortunately, I have a Minolta 5400 to fall back on, and this machine
is now working great for film strips, using Vuescan. Scan from
preview works very well and fast. I just believe this machine with its
film holders indexes better than the Nikon.
Only one other problem, an apparent conflict with Norton Antivirus
Professional 2004 and Vuescan 8.08. See separate post.

Ed Lusby
 
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