I believe incorrect cropping can lead to autoexposure problems. If there is a significant area of black, for example, vuescan would tend to overexpose the raw scan, resulting in clipped highlights. You might check your scans for clipped highlights. If it's a small enough black area, it won't be significant perhaps. Light areas around the actual picture area would be expected to cause a loss of detail in the shadows.
Auto cropping remains to be a problem in vuescan. The problem seems to vary with scanner and certainly vuescan version, as Ed has made many recent attempts to improve auto cropping lately. However, vuescan 8.0.4 remains the best version for me in terms of auto cropping with the LS5000. When Ed changed the auto crop algorithm in 8.0.8 and 8.0.9, he improved filmstrip auto cropping significantly, which was his goal. However slide scanning autocropping was quite bad. In version 8.0.11 (or thereabouts) he made slide auto cropping better, but still not as good as 8.0.4. One can deal with this situation in a couple of ways. You can either install the version best for your usage on a particular day, or you can try the various cropping options. When scanning film strips, you should trim the leading edges of the strips to be the same distance from the picture area for a scanner like the LS5000, which feeds in the bare strip. I much prefer the Minolta 5400 and vuescan for film strips. The auto cropping is very good, perhaps because of the use of a film strip cassette holder in this scanner. Ed Lusby ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
