White Point clipping, Black Point not, and Brightness usually needs heavy upping.

[Phil]

It seems that all slides I am scanning (mostly Fuji) have some White
Point clipping and very high Black Point numbers. Using the "Clipped
Black Color" feature, I am finding the point at which clipping begins
(in the link below it is 2.8) and then setting my Black Point to 2.6.
White Point I am leaving at 0 and there is still a tiny bit of
clipping, and not just from light sources. (For instance, yesterday I
couldn't get rid of white clipping on a forehead highlight so I had to
use Nikon Scan.) A typical Vuescan histogram, along with the resulting
Photoshop histogram looks like this:
http://www.philipscalia.com/vuehist.jpg
In the example, BP clipping in Photoshop starts at Input level 17.
In addition, though I have brightness set to 1.18, the image often
benefits from gamma slider adjustment in PS to 1.3, 1.4 or even
higher. I touched on this in a previous post but thought I'd start
fresh with the visual aid and 2 days more experience. Except for these
seemingly strange numbers, the images seem to look pretty good in
Photoshop.
Should I continue doing what I'm doing, or what? By the way exposure
clipping is set to .1%, and doesn't seem to change the histogram if
set to 1%.
As mentioned in the previous post I have set Adobe RGB as the Output
color space. This is preferred for stock photography. I suppose I
should experiment with that since a couple of you have said this could
be my problem. Monitor color space has been set to an icc profile -
PhotoCal.
Thanks to everyone for the great advice which has been a big help,
Phil

 

[Bernard Leverd]

Phil,
I am not sure to understand what your problem is.
I use only Fuji films (Provia 100F, Astia) and now the new Velvia 100F
(names in Europe), and I don't have to 'push' the brightness. I never
used the Velvia 50 , but I think it's more difficult to scan.
Your BP and WP settings seem odd to me.
IMHO, you should try Media type = Image , BP=0% , WP very low but not
nul, say 0.02% , Brightness = 1 , Color balance=Neutral and right
click on an area you know should be neutral.
Bernard

 

[Phil]

Bernard,
So glad you responded. The trick was changing the Media Type to Image
(was Slide Film). Now I have a histogram that looks like a nice bell
curve. Color balance is still set to White Point, maybe I'll try to
experiment with this too. But for now, this problem is solved.
Many thanks!
Phil