The solution for bad scan quality using Vuescan & Negative Lab Pro
The story
I’m a photographer that has been shooting for quite some time. In my first years I’ve always let the lab develop and scan the film. The lab nearby closed shop, and the nearest lab was way more expensive when it came to scanning. By letting them do the development I could decrease the cost of shooting film and I decided to buy a scanner myself. I bought a Plustek 7400 (which is actually the same as the more recent Plustek 8200i sensor/quality wise.)
At first I only scanned using the VueScan software, directly converting them to positives. I was satisfied for two years, until I had my first paid job on film, which also freed some funds. Time to grab a Lightroom subscription and Negative Lab Pro (NLP)!
The first few months I was very satisfied, with NLP having far better conversions color-wise compared to Vuescan. When the honeymoon phase ended, I started seeing issues in my scans. The grain was never fully in focus and the scans looked muddy because of that reason. Whatever, what can it be?
Shot a holiday in Curaçao, I made sure every shot was taken at f/8 on a sunny day, to ensure the most sharp possible results, on Kodak Gold 200. Still scans looked muddy and I wasn’t too satisfied. Armed with some photos, I decided to submit a post on Reddit. Received only one response.
Looks plenty sharp to me? Like, the crop you made shows all the detail available in the picture. It’s plenty for small to medium size prints. What purposes do you have for this scans?
Yeah… I still wasn’t sure, something surely felt off. Instead of doing proper A/B analysis, I decided I wanted to buy a new scanner. My approach to buying things is to buy something cheap, if I notice I use it a lot, I replace it with the best of the best my money can buy. After a bunch of research, I decided to buy the Coolscan 5000.
The problem
When I bought a Coolscan 5000, I fired up Vuescan on Mac and Lightroom + NLP. Similar results… Is it a skill issue, or is it the scanner? I guess I should try Nikon Scan 4… Took my Windows laptop, installed the software, ran a scan. What? That’s way sharper, and the grain seemed to resolve way better.
I started doing file comparisons, and then I suddenly saw that every VueScan image (that has been imported using the guide that Nate posts on his Negative Lab Pro website) has Color Noise Reduction turned on. This seems to be the default setting for every DNG file imported by Lightroom, it’s a setting that has been “baked” in the file. The good news is, you can turn this setting off, so it’s nothing permanent!
Examples after applying the solution
200% crop - Scan before default DNG noise reduction
200% crop - Scan after default DNG noise reduction
Here you can see two images which show the difference of the 35mm negative (200% crop).
Suddenly the foliage is back! And even a few heads that were initially omitted with the Color Noise Reduction turned on. The swimsuit of the lady has gotten more pink. Heck, there’s so much color… It’s almost as if the photo has been resuscitated. That’s way better, more in line with what I was expecting from 35mm film. The grain is also more coarse, sharp, and is not being masked anymore, which is exactly what I want.
The solution
The correct settings in Lightroom to remove noise that masks the film grain.
The way to do this is to open an image, make “Color Noise Reduction” zero, and then create a preset in Lightroom. Sharpness at 55 works best for my images as a baseline and can always adjust this on a per-image basis.
How to make a preset in Lightroom
What settings to choose when saving the preset
All in all, I’m really satisfied with Negative Lab Pro. Click here to try out a trial which gives you 24 conversions you can play around with! If you would like a couple of CoolScan 5000 DNG files, straight from the scanner, to experiment with, send me an e-mail and I’ll send over some files to you!
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