Best Possible Scans?

filmfan said:
I am interested to see what other people say. I just pop the negs in and click "scan" with my Nikon Coolscan 8000 ED. There has to be something I am not doing because I am not seeing much quality.
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There's a lot you're not doing. First, the negative carriers for this scanner are less than completely worthless. The standard carriers simply will not keep film flat. The 120 never will and the 35mm one will only if the film is 100% totally flat before you put it in the carrier. You MUST have one of the glass carriers, no exceptions, non-negotiable, if you want good scans.

Second, Negs scanned with a film scanner produce very flat low contrast scans with no visible tonal differenciation. You MUST edit these scans in Photoshop. They'll require pretty strong curves and levels adjustments to bring out the full tonal range.

neopan-1600-raw.jpg

The scan straight from the scanner. Like bill, I scan as a transparency when doing black and white.

neopan-1600-raw2.jpg

Inverted in Photoshop to produce a positive. See how flat and lacking in tonality it is? THIS is what most people accept from their scans, and why so many say that scanning cannot give good quality compared to the darkroom. Scanning's not the problem; people just don't know that you have to edit the scans.

neopan-1600-1.jpg

Look at that! A gorgeous Black and White image with full tone range. This took three curves adjustment layers to bring the contrast up to near normal then fine tune the tonality to exactly what I wanted.
 
I tried scanning a a transparency and it did nothing to help. You may be different.

Definately highlight and shadow scans combined in photoshop will work.
 
Thisisaline said:
Does anybody have anything to say about color accuracy and how to best get it when it comes to scanning color negs or slides?
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Slides scan best for me with Nikon Scan, black and white best with Viewscan. I've never had good luck with color negs, unfortunately. Best I got was scanning in viewscan using the 'generic color neg' setting, rather than the film-specific settings. Even then it was not that great.
 
ReeRay said:
snip....

I scan as "flat" as possible i.e. extract maximum range without clipping at either end. No sharpening, curves, adjustments in the scanner.

All adjustments and tweaks in CS3.

This works well for me.
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I have found this scanning technique the way to go., But, I'd rather do a few minutes of spotting, than use the "Anti-Dust" software. I do use a last second film cleaner (Edwal's) and a quick canned air squirt before I place the Negative carrier in the scanner. I'd rather not have any finer detail destroyed with Anti-Dust software.
 
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