canoscan 9000f mark ii software color settings

Is it possible that the only way to truly know what colors are in a negative is to make a darkroom print? Now I’m suspicious of every scan, because of all the choices it represents. It was so much easier when I accepted whatever color I got from my lab scans, as if they were the final word on film and lens. Roberts Camera’s scan got a richer red, but my scan offers better highlight detail. I walked over to the building to make this close shot. The green tint on the right edge of my scan is clearly an artifact of the negative that Robert’s somehow edited out. They got richer colors than I did, although I’d say the sky in mine looks more realistic.

I also tried scanning some Kodak Ektar 100 I shot in my Pentax Spotmatic F with a 35mm f/3.5 SMC Takumar lens. Roberts made those same flowers quite pink, but brought out the detail lurking in the butterfly’s wings. Notice how purple the flowers in the background are.

Here’s my scan of a butterfly pausing over this flower. The sky has a slight turquoise tint and lacks any mottling. Roberts Camera scanned this film when I had them process it.

But it’s not as bad as in previous scans. There’s a little of that mottling in the blue sky that I keep trying to prevent.

Here’s my scan of a photo I made on Kodak Gold 200 with my Olympus OM-1 and a 50mm f/3.5 Zuiko Auto Macro lens. The improvements I made this time were to scan to lossless TIFF files, and to turn off ScanGear’s Image Adjustment setting (which I had overlooked when turning off all the other image-enhancement settings). I see now how much of that is in the scanner settings, and that I don’t actually know how any film I typically use renders color. I used to think that the colors I got back from the lab were the film’s true colors. Getting usable scans from my CanoScan 9000F Mark II via its ScanGear software, on the other hand, is a lot of work involving a number of subjective choices in scanning and post-processing. Any lab I routinely use reliably sends me crackerjack digital images. Lab scans of 35mm color negatives are miracles.

Canoscan 9000f mark ii software color settings