Prescan Color Not Close With Negatives Shot In Studio

[Nick Jahn]

When scanning studio product shots of Fuji NPS negative film (Epson Expression 1680, Photoshop plugin, Mac 9.2.2), after doing the prescan of nine negs in a holder, and selecting the frame to scan, depending on the color of the object, the prescan colors change drastically. These objects are ceramic art shot against a neutral white background with daylight balanced strobe light. For instance, in a photo in which the object that is predominantly green/cyan, the overall caste becomes very red, including the white background. If I move the selection to another frame that contains an object of a different color the prescan colors change to something completely different, sometimes approaching neutrality or true color, sometimes not. I would think that the software would not be affected by the colors contained in the shot, but this is obviously not the case. Shouldn\'t the software just remove the orange mask and invert the colors to positive? I have scanned about 100 120 size negs so far with Silverfast 6 (I had 5.5 and 5 previously), most of those being landscape photos which don\'t seem to have this problem, at least to the extent it exhibits doing the studio product shots, and am very happy with the software for that purpose. Is this just something that I must live with or are you attempting to fix the software? Thanks.

[LSI_Support]

could it be the auto-correction in SilverFast which spoils those frames?

[davidgordon]

could it be the auto-correction in SilverFast which spoils those frames

It is the automatic operation of Negfix which is the problem.

Select the 'expert' options in Negfix.
In the expansion tab untick the 'Auto'

Negfix will now no longer attempt to remove the orange mask every time you change crop of frame - which is the issue.

I usually click 'Auto' (making sure there is no film rebate in the crop box). This removes the mask for this film. I then disable the mask by unticking the 'Auto' and go about cropping and correcting.

This is not explained in the Users Manual as far as I know!

[nsnape]

Good idea.
Could this also be a way to scan for contacts sheets?
I was trying to do just that the other day but gave up and printed darkroom contacts as the spaces between the negs was playing with the base color set up.