Epson Perfection V500 Photo is indeed, an amazing scanner. This is a simple and short guide to properly scan your Color Negative films. But remember that home scanning doesn’t mean shifting your colors too much!
Photo by yopanic
The Lomographic philosophy suggests the “DIY belief”.
DIY is one of the coolest features of Lomography and I think it’s one of the reasons why I love Lomography so much.
What’s more DIY than scanning? So let’s speak about scanning. One of the best sellers in the scanner’s atmosphere is the Epson Perfection V500 Photo. Why? Well, it’s a great HQ scanner at a very fair price. Lomo films and the V500 are like dynamite together!
Color Negative films are great, even the ones with a low ISO. The V500 actually empowers them, automatically giving a natural Lomo feeling to your shots. Since Lomography is not about digital re-touching of pics, you have to use the V500 in Professional Mode, because you should turn off or lower the automatic color correction.
In my humble opinion, this “do not change colors!” philosophy is only about Color Negative films, because XPro films require (sometimes, it depends on the film you’re scanning) some special setting. I will speak about XPro scanning in my next Tipster.
So this is how the V500 settings should be with CN films: First, open the Epson Scan software and go to Professional Mode:
- Set the kind of film you’re going to scan: Color Negative.
- The only setting you may flag is the Contrast Mask, but I don’t like it with CN films.
- Set the quality of your scanning: I like 3200 dpi, because it renders a high quality and lets you have a fast scanning (about 120-140 seconds for a single picture).
- Start the preview.
- Scan.
Here some examples:
I hope this simple tutorial helped you maximize the results produced by scanning color negative films.
13 comments
gionnired
Thanks for sharing! I'm interested to read your next tipster about XPro scanning ;)
ft_slm
yopanic
@ft_slm I used the LC-Wide...
If you want to see more pics with the LC-Wide, you can check these 3 albums:
http://www.lomograph(…)2381-comino
http://www.lomograph(…)23-valletta
http://www.lomograph(…)59-mellieha
lucianalfaro
Good tip! I was thinking about a scanner. That helps! Thanks!
megzeazez
Awesome! I love my epson scanner, too. Can't wait to try your xpro tipster.
yopanic
@megzeazez here it is: http://www.lomograph(…)sitive-film
megzeazez
Thanks!!
neversmiling
I've been needing a scanner, but was unsure where to start. This article helped a lot, thanks!
kingt4
Good stuff!
dooby
I use this scanner also - great bit of kit for a very reasonable cost
tqueiroz
Nice tipster! BTW what do you usually d to clean your scanner glasses?
yopanic
@tqueiroz, Swiffer is the way... ;)
tqueiroz
=)