Railfan Technology > EPSON V550 Scanning question

I recently purchased one of these scanners. First and foremost, I am very pleased with what I can do with it. But I seem to be having some issues when it comes to scanning some of my B&W Medium Format negs.
 When I scan them, It appears that the "program" or what ever isn't seeing what I am scanning coorectly. I use the Professional Mode and scan the size I believe it should be under. What I get on quite a few are what appear to be small squares/maybe pixelated areas of the scan. Small "black" squares that are not on the negative. Most of what I am scanning has printed up with no issues, but when I scan these it doesn't come out quite right. Not sure what's going on. Have tried different modes/setting/adjustments/size even tried scanning them as Color Film. No luck.  Getting frustrated. Here is an image that I have tried with the defects apparent. Any ideas ?  Ben  (Its the small black squares that one can see)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/19 17:05 by msns2557.

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What program are you using to scan?  Can you take a screen shot of your scan settings and post it here? 

Evan_Werkema Wrote:
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> What program are you using to scan?  Can you take
> a screen shot of your scan settings and post it
> here? 

Evan, The program is whichever one came with the scanner. Digital Ice is part of it. But, yes I'll post what my settings are.( Might take me awhile tho, as I have to leave for abit) Ben

Evan_Werkema Wrote:
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> What program are you using to scan?  Can you take
> a screen shot of your scan settings and post it
> here? 

Here are the settings for the scans. This appears to only be an issue with medium format B&W Negatives. Color scans turn out good as do 35mm B&W/Color Scans.  Not a screen shot but the settings.

In Preview:  Professional Mode; Film and set to B&W Negative; 8 Bit Grayscale (Have tried 16 bit Grayscale and also Color settings); UnSharp Mask/on; Grain Reduction/on; Digital Ice Technology/on; under Config settings, 6X9 Film size. (have tried other settings also) Medium Format Film

When in Scan Mode.  Screen size is set to 768x1024 (Have tried other sizes, same results) Compression Lvl [10], Encoding-Standard

This is what I am using on these. I do have IrfanView as a photo editing Program also.

Does any of this help?  Thanks to any and all who might respond.  Ben

Thank you for sharing an intriguing mystery. What you're getting here greatly resembles an image where a "posterization" (NOT "polarization") filter is being applied to the scan.

Posterization (very rarely used in any railfan-oriented digital imaging) is a purely aesthetic choice that numerous types of image-editing software allow the user to voluntarily apply to a picture. In a nutshell, posterization turns areas with smooth tone (lighting) transitions into areas of abrupt transitions with locally high contrast, making it look like a publicity poster. I speculate that the frequent small black squares (especially among the gravel ballast) are visual artifacts created by a posterization process.

Why is such a filter being applied to the raw scan output of your medium-format B&W negs but neither 35mm B&W nor color film? Perhaps you somehow nudged a really subtle choice in your scanner settings, and it's now part of an unwanted profile of automatic actions that's applied only when your scanner hardware determines that the film type is medium-format B&W. Yes, I do know that's a pretty obscure possibility, but your Penn Central sample image instantly reminded me of it.

The plain fact that this effect is not present when you scan any other type/size of film indicates to me that it may well be an error with the scanner's bundled software, and (hopefully) not a hardware flaw in the scanner device itself.

To begin with, turn ICE off. You cannot use digital ICE on film bases with a silver halide emulsion. I would turn off sharpening and grain reduction too. I never use these with B&W negs.

I agree that Digital ICE would be a prime suspect.  With certain types of film, particularly Kodachrome but also some kinds of black and white, it can cause very strange artifacts and effects.  Nikon and Minolta somehow got Digital ICE to work with Kodachrome in some long-out-of-production slide scanners, but Epson never has as far as I know.

Epson Scan also has a "Dust removal" checkbox, which doesn't give the artifacts but does tend to remove small details that aren't dust.  Unfortunately, when scanning with a flatbed, I've found it's better to clone-out the dust by hand in an editor rather than try to let the scanner software take care of it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/05/19 22:48 by Evan_Werkema.

Thanks, Justa shout out to all those who responded. Doing what was suggested by trainjunkie and Evan has apparently resolved the issue. Have scanned 6 images that I was having difficulties with and upon making the changes and re-scanning, they look good. So thanks to all. Really appreciate the info. and help.  Ben      (If ya wnat to see the re-scanned images check out the Nostalgia Board, will be sharing them here)

Evan_Werkema Wrote:
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> I agree that Digital ICE would be a prime
> suspect.  With certain types of film,
> particularly Kodachrome but also some kinds of
> black and white, it can cause very strange
> artifacts and effects.  Nikon and Minolta somehow
> got Digital ICE to work with Kodachrome in some
> long-out-of-production slide scanners, but Epson
> never has as far as I know.
>
> Epson Scan also has a "Dust removal" checkbox,
> which doesn't give the artifacts but does tend to
> remove small details that aren't dust. 
> Unfortunately, when scanning with a flatbed, I've
> found it's better to clone-out the dust by hand in
> an editor rather than try to let the scanner
> software take care of it.

^^^This.
Don't use ANY of that "auto-fix" software in the scanner bundle. You are far better off doing that stuff post-scan in Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Lightroom. Takes a bit longer but the resuts are well worth it.

I have been using a V550 now for over three years and the only trouble I have had was when I turned too muich of that auto-prcessing on.

Here is an example of the finished products I'm getting:

NZ 

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