It just takes a bit to put it all together in your mind to where you don't even have to think while using it.

The Curves tool is simple, graphical, and extremely robust. I find the Curves tool to be much more intuitive than the Colorperfect tools. It's one of those skills that comes in handy a lot more often than you would think, once you've developed it. The advantage to using the Curves tool so often is that I can now color correct just about anything in a very short time, not just color negative film scans. It was extremely difficult at first, but eventually, I developed a feel for it, and now it doesn't take me long at all to color correct (or color match) a photo. But I will warn you, that tool took a lot of time and experience to get good at using it. I can get excellent results in very little time with the Curves tool. I eventually went back to using the Photoshop Curves tool. It's manual controls were unnecessarily complex and difficult to use. It's presets didn't give me good results. I tried Colorperfect based on the many recommendations out there on the internet and gave up on it. There are several ways of doing this, but the main thing is sampling & dividing out the orange mask before inversion. Then you can flatten, do your inversion, create some curve layers to set the black and white points individually for RGB using the clipping warnings, do some tonal adjustments, fine colour correction etc & in less time than it's taken me to write this, you'll have a very good looking file that'll show you what film is really capable of. Main thing is getting a 16-bit positive scan/ image with some negative rebate without any clipping whatsoever (desktop flatbeds are not up to this in my experience owing to Dmax shortcomings - high end CCD or PMT scanners are really kind of necessary, also possibly one of the few things DSLRs are good for) and working in ProphotoRGB or similar, sample the rebate, create a new layer filled with the sampled colour, set to 'divide' which will remove the orange mask just about perfectly. It's often simpler to do it by hand once you know what needs to be done.

Vuescan review 2018