If I set them both to 0%, the triangles move all the way to the end of the scale.
I tried to set the black to 0%, and the White to .01% - isn’t this better than moving the triangle to the far right?
What do each of these really do, in simple English?
Blackpoint determines the point (setting, percentage, …)
from where (below in this case) everything is full black without a chance to revive
Whitepoint dertermines …
from where (above …) everything is full white (blown out) …
Curve low [0,25 as standard ?] changes the curve’s shape for the dark tones
(brightens / darkens …)
Curve high [0,75 as standard ?] changes the curve’s shape for the bright tones
(brightens / darkens …)
see → https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.pdf (p.78, 79)
So much complexity.
I set Color Balance to “neutral” and left it there. I suspect you would prefer for me to set this to Manual, and use the triangles at the bottom for adjusting each image. Or, I can select “Auto levels” and the software will do this for me automatically for every image. I will try this on my next scanned images.
Black point - I was using 0.01%, but the suggested value is 0
White point - they suggest using “1”, meaning 1% of the pixels will be set to pure white.
Curves - I used to use .25 and .75 but an article about this suggested that .3 and .7 which provides more detail in both the black and white parts of the image.
There is a lot more to it - I will start out with just this for now.
Reading the manual is fascinating, but I would prefer to be dealing with just one issue at a time. I can tell myself that GIGO always applies (Garbage in = garbage out), but I’m hoping the above is a reasonable default for now. (…and I haven’t scanned any color film yet, and at that point this will get even more complicated.)
Thanks again.
Mike, you were asking 4 questions I tried to answer – no more. 
Try out, nothing gets broken. – Take notes, before you change something, so you know from where you started.
OK, “Color Balance” is back to “neutral” where I had it before I started to read the manual.
I will be content with moving the triangles around, as needed, so I’m not clipping useful data.
I was hoping to find a basic setting that would simply convert the negative into a file, and I would do all the rest in PL4. I expected all the fine tuning would be done in PL4. I guess it does make sense that the better I can get the scan, the easier it will be to edit in PL4. Ain’t nuthin’ easy. …and thanks for putting up with me.
We all learn.
I registered for VueScan in 2005, when Nikon didn’t support my filmscanner anymore, and checked now with my old but calibrated office flatbed scanner, normally running with Epson Scan software.
If Epson Scan had updated their software to work with the new 64-bit software Apple moved to, I would still be using Epson scan. After a year or two of searching and finding nothing, someone suggested VueScan, which solved all my issues.
My scanner came complete with SilverFast, and all of you were using that software, by now I would have switched I think. Since most of you seem more familiar with VueScan, and since I have a little experience with it, I’ll stick with it until one of you gives me a good reason to start over again with “SilverFast 9” (I think that’s what I now have).
I also love testing things, and comparing, which is why my camera is all set up on my balcony again, this time with my Leica M10 and a 25mm Voigtlander lens.
You’ve been using VueScan for almost 20 years??? Wow. You could probably write the manual on it. I used it as a tool with my Epson V500 PHOTO, but only as a tool - I had no interest in “learning” it, I just wanted to scan paper documents, and later on, 35mm negatives, which is where things started to get complicated.
Ignore this post - I put it in the wrong place, now fixed.
Sorry. Too many windows open at once.
NO, Silverfast is way too expensive.
If you plan to venture into scanning and converting colour negatives, I propose that you look into the scanning sections of this forum:
While the forum is focused around the “Negative Lab Pro” plug-in for Lightroom version 6 and Lightroom Classic, there are many hints (in the forum and the guide) that you might find useful for scanning.
Thank you for the interesting link … and just a side note to @mikemyers & all
after testing VueScan
exported / saved as Tiff-file = can be processed in PL
exported / saved as Raw → DNG = cannot be processed in PL
I haven’t been shooting color negative film yet, but I did buy some. Thanks for the link. I guess I ought to start reading. Maybe in a month or so I’ll start, but I think I should wait until I have B&W scanning going smoothly before I do any color. I would have preferred to buy 12-exposure rolls of film, but since 36 and 24 exposure cost mostly the same, I went with 36. As to software, while I still have Lightroom, that would make everything too complex. I’ve decided I’m staying with PL4 (at least until PL5 comes out).
Again, while I may lose in not being able to work with a RAW file, this just means that I will be scanning to a TIFF file.
I’m already losing out on DNG images from my Leica M8.2, as the only way to get them into PL4 is by converting them to TIFF. (My photo life is already too overwhelmingly complicated, and remember more editors, with all their settings and usages, is more than I want to deal with. 99% of my energy will go into PROCESSING, as much as possible, and all I want my scanning to do, is capture a reasonable scan that I can edit in PhotoLab. I have no idea yet what will happen when I get a roll of color film developed, and feed it into my Plustek/VueScan. Maybe in two or three weeks I’ll get around to that, not now.
… just looking for trouble.
It seems like everything I do is “looking for trouble”. If I was smarter, I’d quit while I was ahead, or at least not too far behind, but I always seem to be “pushing myself”.
Thanks to all of you, this forum “feels” like a graduate level course in advanced photography processing, but I think that’s how I learn best, by making mistakes and correcting them, then going on to even more complicated mistakes.
By contrast, Lightroom is easy - watch a few videos, and go at it. Even the DxO webinars are mostly very advanced level courses, and even “PhotoJoseph” sometimes forgets things until others remind him. You guys (wrong word, how about “all of you”) make PhotoJoseph seem like a first grade teacher.
Honestly speaking though, if I don’t get the basic stuff correct, anything done on top of that is already damaged, like building a beautiful building on a lousy foundation.
What I learned today is that even the images I was feeding into PL4 were damaged before they ever got out of my camera.
Without getting the foundation right, the building may well topple over, no matter how beautiful it looks.
Anyway, back to me, I don’t know anybody in “real life” who is even 10% as involved in all this as I’m getting, but the results speak for themselves. Most people I know put their camera on in (A)utomatic mode and are happy with the pretty pictures they get. For the ones who try (M)anual mode, their pictures look like garbage, and they have no idea as to why. A very few of them, in India, did want to learn, read the books, practiced, and they are now getting wonderful results.
One good thing - I’m retired, and I can make the time to work at this until I get it right. Maybe not “right” as in the photos Joanna posts here, but closer to that than I was a month, or a year ago. There is always “tomorrow” to improve even more.
That’s what I keep telling myself 
@mikemyers – as you already experienced, it’s not so easy to get the hybrid workflow right in B&W, but then going with color (neg) film by introducing even more variables – you will have more details to solve (to avoid the word ‘trouble’).
…color negative conversion is just more work, but it’s not too complicated imo…
not too complicated but …
Learning from your and others tips here in the forum, I did so with some ‘historic’ colour negatives, which I had copied with the cam. While with raw-files it’s already easier to get the colours ‘right’, I didn’t like the reversed functions. – Later I got to know, I could have done with an intermediate DNG-file (never tried it).
Compared to a nowadays digital workflow and without giving any advantage, it’s just too much and extra work. – Most of my time I took slides and so far, I only revived a couple of important memories to print, some of them big.
I have a pile of slides, and I’ve long since lost track of what is on them. I have a projector, and I bought a viewer long ago. One of these days I’ll have to check them out again, and see how much is worth scanning.
I’ll start slowly. I don’t know when, maybe in late October. If I had it to do over again, I think I would have skipped buying the film. It will be interesting as a test, but Joanna has me mostly talked out of analog - not completely though.
Today was overwhelmingly frustrating, just testing some lenses, and getting ridiculous results. By comparison, scanning seems simpler and easier, depending on whose advice I follow. Wolfgang’s suggestions sounded like there was no need for them, but now I’ve come around to believe the better I do a scan, the easier it will be to do the editing in PL4. As for color slides - I guess I’ll find out. Ditto for color negatives. But not now.