Bart, you never fail to amaze me with your knowledge of everything camera. Honestly.
At times, I amaze myself ;-) When I used to work for Kodak (in better times, many moons ago), they used to jokingly call me the walking encyclopedia. They were obviously wrong, because I still learn something new every day.
Can you explain how to do this? I use Dfine-2.0 on every image and it seems to do a great job.
Maybe you are referring to finding the white point in scanner which will be the black point when inverted.
Yes, that's it, the scanner+filmmask whitepoint. VueScan has what Ed Hamrick calls an
Advanced Workflow, which balances the channel exposure times based on a piece of the film leader or the between-image space. That effectively neutralizes the masking layer, but maintains what ever color balance/cast there may be in the almost transparent shadow areas (it is e.g. no problem if the shadows under a tree canopy look slightly brown/green, because they do). That also maximises the signal levels in all three channels right up to the clipping point for the shadows at 65535 in 16-bit. That also means that the less transparent highlights also have the maximum signal possible, without losing any shadow data. VueScan also allows to verify that by optionally showing the Raw data histogram, or a simulated Optical Density reading (one of my requests that made it into the software).
That is what I used to do all the time in silverfast with the Epson 750.
AFAIK the V750 doesn't allow to vary the per channel exposure times, so I assume that Silverfast does an auto-level processing.
I do find the images slightly flat but is is very quick and easy to fix as you say. A plus is I don't get the odd color casts anymore and the whole process doesn't take long.
That's right, waiting for the scan pass itself takes more time, and coffee ;-).
Cheers,
Bart