Testing Epson V500 Scan of a 35mm Zeiss Contax IIIa Colour Negative

Unlike my Canon 4400f the Epson V500 scanner is in focus, also the slide holder are much better and easier to use. It also works on medium format. The new scanner will allow me to do more B&W in the future. This shot is nothing special but the I choose it as it needed a lot of dodging and burning

Notice the camera information in the additional information.

Yes the v500 is excellent price performance wise. Unfortuately the scanner software does not provide exif information.

one program that make it easy to add exif is filmtagger

I did a test of my v500 on a resolution target and found the focus was good for about 800 lines per inch from 0 to .5mm plus the film thickness from the surface of the glass, going from 2400 to 4800 dpi made no real differences, kind of explains why you have to go to medium format to get a worth while size print. Also explains why a special film holder is not going to buy you much with the v500 optics and it's LED illumination.

This confirmed the results of wet scanning with the film right against the glass




My Current Work Flow

1. Clean everything with antistatic cloth 
2. Set scanner to pro mode, 3600 DPI for 35mm and 2400 DPI for MF in 48 bit tiff output  
3. Insert negatives If they are too curly use anti-glare glass instead of plastic holders. 
4. Blow any dust off with a rocket blower (If you are rich use canned air). 
5. Preview
6. Select all negatives and turn off sharpening and hit auto curve button to see what the epson software things it should look like 
7. For each negative adjust curve so there is no clipping using the droppers to set white and black and gamma and colour balance. The epson software is so primitive here, that my main concern that there is no highlight clipping or shadow blocking. Do this for each colour as the over all may look good but one channel might not. The point here is not to get a perfect scan but to get all the information out of the negative. 
8. Scan
   
9. Optional If you need more shadow or highlight details then do an additional scan to expand the contrast in the highlight or dark areas blend the images back together in post. I don't have to do this very often. In post I use Lightroom to correct the image and remove any dust.
   

Important because you have turned sharpening off you need 2 levels of sharpening one for the scan and one just before final output. Fortunately lightroom has pretty good control here. The first level of sharpening is important and should be matched to the grain size and the scanning DPI it is not there to sharpen edges.