Why are my RAW files created by Vuescan so dark in Aperture?

That jives with what I've been able to gather. This board is a good discussion:

http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00XZH6

It seems that the VueScan RAW file isn't a "camera" RAW at all, but merely a super-unedited (big) file w/ infrared infromation incluced (as you indicated, only if you turn it "ON").

What I didn't realize… is that it's not really meant to be opened in Aperture or PhotoShop. It's meant to be opened in VueScan.

Duh.

Personally, I'm still A/B-ing VueScan with NikonScan (in Windows 7), and I gotta say that IMHO NikonScan seems to get slightly better scan. But I can't help thinking that I'm not quite using VueScan correctly.

Some of my VueScan scans have some blow-out white areas, whereas my NikonScan scans of the same images are in better shape.

But again, that's using some pretty basic settings.

Interesting. I had different results - NikonScans of Kodachrome looked like Picasso's blue period whereas Vuescan had better balance.

Again, the secrect of Vuescan is that it has soooooo very many options. Scan an image and you can play with white balance, exposure, etc. before you save. You can change just about anything that does not depend on the physical scan - thus you must have IR clean engaged to capture the data and you cannot, of course, change the focus point. But you can turn the IR clean on and off, the same with all of the various recovery filters, RGB levels, etc. Vuescan is insanely flexible. The only thing it lacks is a good user manual. But now there is a book you can buy. I may just do it as I am about to tackle color negatives.

Good luck!

--

DiploStrat 😉

I'd just like to state the obvious and note that there is really NO advantage to scanning B&W negs to RAW. They do turn out darker, but the file size is exactly the same, the latitude is exactly the same, and both get a greyscale profile.

I have been wondering about scanning more than one item at a time. I seem to see different color and exposure treatments applied to my various objects (CD covers by the way is what I have experience with).

Let me try to clarify. When I scan cover and select just the cover, I get a white level that is often slightly dark and more gray as compared to when I select the cover and some of the white from the scanner lid. I know I can compensate using the Border & Buffer settings on the crop tab to ignore the lid area.

Now, the question. How would that work with 2 objects?

My assumption is that the average of the 2 would be used to set the exposure of the scan; therefore, making the final result for both less than optimal. Which would seem to make the issue one of losslessly saving a an already degraded scan.

My intuition tells me that the more important issue of scanning objects is selecting the crop borders carefully rather than the issue of .tif, RAW.tif, or RAW.dng.

You question would be much more appropriate as a new thread, rather than a different-topic hijack of a 2-year-old thread.