Prec. Dig. Negative and Vuescan Reflective Densitometer

[JeffD]

Wondering if anyone who is using the "precision digital negative" system has used vuescan as their reflection densitometer.

I probably won't be able to purchase a stand alone densitometer, and the scanner method on pages 98 through 101 looks to painful to me!

[Jeremy]

I use an Epson 2450 Photo scanner as my densitometer. I have Vuescan, but I use the Epson software as suggested by Mark and it works just fine.

[JeffD]

Vuescan has a pretty precise densitometer built in, that I was hoping to use.

Though it is precise, and relative density changes should be correct, I don't know how accurate it is across the board. I did some film tests using it as a transmission densitometer, and it worked well enough to give me a real film speed for my film/developer combination.

The scanning system that Mark mentions looks like kind of a headache, but maybe only because he describes it in such detail!

[davidharris]

I suspect the reading doesn't have to be precise, it is the relative results that count, after all Mark's method using a scan from an uncalibrated scanner isn't precise.

Using Vuescan as a densitometer gives varying readings across a square, especially in the shadow areas. For example, I just tried it and got readings between 2.06 and 2.18 for the 01 square. I think the important thing is to take the readings in a consistent way - ie, take the maximum reading throughout or an average reading throughout - probably finding the maximum will be easier.

Using Vuescan saves about 1 hour of effort compared with Mark's suggested scanner workflow.

[Jeremy]

The idea behind Mark's workflow is that after you have the image scanned you select a section of each square and Filter>Blur>Average which gives you a square of all one density. This cuts down on a whole lot of inconsistantcies.

[JeffD]

Using vuescan, you can scan with a filter to cause heavy "grain reduction". This will minimize the small variations within a square, I believe.