V700 Blotchy Shadows

[towsilver]

I have had a Epson V700 scanner for some time but have never been able to get the quality scans from transparencies that I believe is possible. I gave up over 12 months ago with the scanner and Silverfast due to the severe frustration of only being able to produce very poor results but have recently found some time to try again. I thought maybe if I upgraded to the latest version of Silverfast SE plus with multi-scanning I might have better luck, unfortunately not. I produce no better scans with the Silverfast software than I do with the Epson software. The main problem I have is that the shadow areas are very poor and blotchy and there also doesn't seem to very good gradations of colour. Another oddity which must be something I haven't set properly is that these problems seem to be much more evident in Lightroom, Silverfast Preview Screen and Photoshop than they are in my quick review software such as ACDC/Picasa. Have thousands of transparencies and negatives to scan but see no point starting until I can achieve a reasonable result. Using Adobe RGB 1998, a monitor with 32bit colour, PhotoshopCS2 and Lightroom 2 and have done a factory reset in Siverfast. Any help would be much appreciated, I have had a look through the QT movies but they basically seem to be refining the image, I can't seem to get a decent starting point.
Best regards, Michael

[LSI_Heidorn]

Dear Michael,
if you want to make sure that the Problem is *not* due to your setup but really a problem of the scanner, you can simply do a scan in 48 Bit HDR.
This really produces the raw output of the scanner.
Then load it into our HDR Software or into Photoshop and add some decent Gamma and take a close look.
If the Dark tones still appear "blotchy", this has to be an inherent problem of the scanner and can only be solved by good profiling AND some decent post processing.
Once you worked out how to scan / adjust the images to look okay you can save those settings in SilverFast and also decide to use that adjustments as Default.

best regards,

Nils Heidorn

[towsilver]

Dear Nils,
Thank you for your response. I have followed your suggestion and scanned 48bit HDR into Photoshop and I am now starting to make some progress. By making adjustments in Photoshop I am learning a great deal and getting a much more pleasing result but still far from perfect and for some reason with Blue being my main source of problems. Will be back with more questions as I progress.
Best regards, Michael

[towsilver]

Making some real headway now. Most of the problem seems to have been poor colour calibration of the monitor and generally sorting out colour profiles in Photoshop. Using the HDR scanning settings at the moment and getting good results from most transparencies as long as they are not underexposed.
Thank you for your help.
Regards, Michael