calibrating Epson scanners for b&w?

[mh2000]

I have an Epson 4990 and just like my old 2750 (whatever it was) it seems like my tone curve are somehow wrong with b&w scans (full range of tones, but need lots of curve work to look corrent... and sometimes never get there... don't have this problem with my Coolscan)

Has anyone calibrated b&w film for these scanners?

I run the scanner with Vuescan. I think I can shoot a grey target and use Quadtone RIP to make a ICC profile. Anyone have experience doing this? Any tips?

thanks!

 

[xvvvz]

Have you tried the profiles within Vuescan? Those are pretty decent and choose your density. With that said, I don't think scanning profiles are worth the effort in many cases.

Personally, I find it easier to just get a base scan with as much of the information from the film as possible (as close to raw sensor data that you can get). No clipping, etc. Then go into Photoshop and do your curve adjustments there where you have better tools.

Doug

 

[Bob Michaels]

Personally, I find it easier to just get a base scan with as much of the information from the film as possible (as close to raw sensor data that you can get). No clipping, etc. Then go into Photoshop and do your curve adjustments there where you have better tools.
Doug

Yep, that's exactly the way I learned works best.

The scans really look flat. But the final prints look the best they can because you have control of all the variables in your image editor.

 

[robertdfeinman]

I would also suggest trying both 8 and 16 bit scanning. Some people (including me) feel that large-scale tone adjustments done in 16 bit mode provide better tonality. B&W negatives need a lot of tone adjusting so this seems a good place for 16 bit.

After you do the contrast and density range adjustments you can convert (and flatten) to 8 bit for output.

Sometimes scanning in color mode also proves useful. You convert to grayscale in Photoshop by choosing the color channel which has the least noise.

It's easy enough to try these variations and see if they make any difference to you and then decide on your final workflow.

 

[mh2000]

thanks guys... but I am doing all that stuff correctly in 16 bit/channel rgb, converting in photoshop, get a nice histogram, but the tone curve seems subtly all wrong and takes too much curve work to correct. When I use my Coolscan the tones come in flat but good and typically only require a 2 or 3 point curve correction to get my final image.

I guess the most straightforward approach would be to profile my film to the workflow and just assign a profile to my image in Photoshop after I've set the levels.

While I did shoot a kodak target today, I think I'll give Silverfast a try since I see the disks sitting here... maybe their profiles are better than the Vuescan ones in this case.