Interesting video. I've only used Nikon Scan with my Nikon scanner, except for trying VueScan and Silverfast briefly at least 15 years ago. Gave up on Silverfast because of their license structure (expensive and you had to buy their package for each scanner you used). VueScan was inexpensive and supports everything with a single license and has a lot of features, but I scanned mostly mounted slides with a SF200 slide feeder and that didn't work well with VueScan (don't remember details) so I continued using Nikon Scan. I see the point of setting the exposure so the scans will reflect how you exposed the film, but for me it's more important to get a good starting point for minor adjustments and I use auto exposure most of the time when batch scanning. That usually give pretty good results for most images and then I go back and rescan from 0 to a few images from a batch where I think I can do better than the auto settings. Scanning to 16 bits per channel TIF give decent flexibility for post processing, but having "real" RAW file was one reason I tried VueScan. I also tried scanning to NEF-files with Nikon Scan, but didn't see any clear advantage compared to using TIF and very little documentation for NEF from a Coolscan.
Thanks for the information! I stopped using Nikon Scan before I even learned Auto Exposure was a thing, my biggest issue with it was that in Non Converted Negative mode, it wasn't allowing me to properly offset the frames without cutting part of the image, in a strip, the first or last would run out of adjustment, and I would have missing data. So I went to VueScan since it doesnt block you from offsetting all you want. I tend to agree Auto Exposure works most of the time, my gripe with it is that sometimes I had two almost identical photos with complete different rendition because it decided one should have different value than the other, and that made me crazy! Cheers
Maybe my use of autoexposure in Nikon Scan wasn't clear enough. For a batch in the slide feeder you load the first slide and (if you want) do an auto exposure and any other adjustments you want. These settings are applied to all the images in the scan and as long as the images are from the same film and reasonable well exposed you'll get very usable results. I guess it achieves a somewhat similar goal as you describe in the video. Not with the same level of control, but with a more visual interface and still fairly good results. A very dark exposure will come out dark and overexposed will be too bright. If I want the outliers handled differently I have to rescan them with the appropriate settings.
@@frstesiste7670 Yeah I can see what you are saying, just make sure your first slide is a bright one, so autoexposure wont be set in a way that clips further down the strip! Cheers
Interesting video. I've only used Nikon Scan with my Nikon scanner, except for trying VueScan and Silverfast briefly at least 15 years ago. Gave up on Silverfast because of their license structure (expensive and you had to buy their package for each scanner you used). VueScan was inexpensive and supports everything with a single license and has a lot of features, but I scanned mostly mounted slides with a SF200 slide feeder and that didn't work well with VueScan (don't remember details) so I continued using Nikon Scan.
I see the point of setting the exposure so the scans will reflect how you exposed the film, but for me it's more important to get a good starting point for minor adjustments and I use auto exposure most of the time when batch scanning. That usually give pretty good results for most images and then I go back and rescan from 0 to a few images from a batch where I think I can do better than the auto settings. Scanning to 16 bits per channel TIF give decent flexibility for post processing, but having "real" RAW file was one reason I tried VueScan. I also tried scanning to NEF-files with Nikon Scan, but didn't see any clear advantage compared to using TIF and very little documentation for NEF from a Coolscan.
Thanks for the information! I stopped using Nikon Scan before I even learned Auto Exposure was a thing, my biggest issue with it was that in Non Converted Negative mode, it wasn't allowing me to properly offset the frames without cutting part of the image, in a strip, the first or last would run out of adjustment, and I would have missing data. So I went to VueScan since it doesnt block you from offsetting all you want. I tend to agree Auto Exposure works most of the time, my gripe with it is that sometimes I had two almost identical photos with complete different rendition because it decided one should have different value than the other, and that made me crazy!
Cheers
Maybe my use of autoexposure in Nikon Scan wasn't clear enough. For a batch in the slide feeder you load the first slide and (if you want) do an auto exposure and any other adjustments you want. These settings are applied to all the images in the scan and as long as the images are from the same film and reasonable well exposed you'll get very usable results. I guess it achieves a somewhat similar goal as you describe in the video. Not with the same level of control, but with a more visual interface and still fairly good results. A very dark exposure will come out dark and overexposed will be too bright. If I want the outliers handled differently I have to rescan them with the appropriate settings.
@@frstesiste7670 Yeah I can see what you are saying, just make sure your first slide is a bright one, so autoexposure wont be set in a way that clips further down the strip! Cheers