Color or grayscale for scanning B&W film?

Color or grayscale for scanning B&W film?

  • Color

    Votes: 92 28.7%

  • Grayscake

    Votes: 229 71.3%
  • Total voters
    321
16 bit Grayscake for me on an Epson V700 initially using the Epsonscan software, then tweaking and cleaning in LR.
I've played around with scanning in color (24 and 48 bit) and personally didn't notice enough of a difference to compensate for the speedier scans of grayscale.
 
16 bit greyscale. But as a positive, then invert in PP. It seems to lessen the scanner´s propensity for enhancing grain (V500).
 
iamzip said:
I just recently purchased an Epson 4490 scanner, and I was wondering what setting most people use when scanning B&W negs?
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32-bit (as in color) "transparency"; you literally have the "negative" scanned; post-process in Photoshop. If that's a daunting task (it can be if one doesn't have the patience to learn and/or apply the process), simply scan 16-bit greyscale without any curves or levels applied. Do that later.

Unless you trust the scanning program you use, you should scan with the most information as possible. The equivalent of you printing your negs vs. letting the underpaid, undertrained guy at the drugstore lab do it for you.
 
I would like to scan grayscale (silverfast/plustek 120) but use capture nx2 (+nik plugins) for editing the scans and it turns out that the tiffs produced by the grascale scan cannot be loaded by cnx2. I end up scanning in color, loading into cnx2 and desaturating the color (not sure that's the best way to get to b&w but it seems to work).

any tips greatly appreciated - I spent some time messing with the grayscale tiffs to try and get cnx2 to understand them without much success. I found I could edit the image in irfanview to get cnx2 to load it but this was tripling the size of the tiff - in effect duplicating the single channel among two others (I guess).
 
ayazdani said:
16 bit Grayscake for me on an Epson V700 initially using the Epsonscan software, then tweaking and cleaning in LR.
I've played around with scanning in color (24 and 48 bit) and personally didn't notice enough of a difference to compensate for the speedier scans of grayscale.
Click to expand...


Same here with my V700... there is plenty of exposure controls to get it very close... Also, I save in the "Adobe aRBG", NOT the Epson Profile!!..

I load it in Lr55 for any further adjustments, them maybe PSCC if I need more complex editing, save as a JPG for the final image.
 
I scan in color with Plutesk, convert to BW in PS.

My concern with post processing from BW negative, sometime eliminate "signature/character" of negative film.
Let's say, scan result from Neopan negative can be adjusted to "like Tr-X" by PS action/workflow/preset...🙂

So probably later what I need is cheap low contrast BW negative film but has good detail . Contrast,shadow/highlight can be added later in software.......😀
 
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I scan as my Imacon scanner sees it, highest resolution in RGB, and then export to convert in Photoshop CS6 after selecting the preferred channel.

Scanner conversion software takes longer and adds it's own flavour.

Gary
 
ayazdani said:
16 bit Grayscake for me on an Epson V700 initially using the Epsonscan software, then tweaking and cleaning in LR.
I've played around with scanning in color (24 and 48 bit) and personally didn't notice enough of a difference to compensate for the speedier scans of grayscale.
Click to expand...

This is my workflow exactly. I've found that I need to scan individual frames and tweak the levels (in Epson scan software) in order to get results I like - if I let the scanner just auto-expose they rarely come out right.
 
There really is no such thing as "scanning in greyscale". All photo scanners will actually scan the red channel, the green channel, and the blue channel even if what they are scanning is a greyscale b&w negative. This is never user adjustable. This raw data will result in very similar results if what is being scanned is no more than black and white. This raw data is sent from the actual scanner back to the CPU to be manipulated by the scanner driver software into a usable file.

The scan driver software can be set to either output the individual RGB channels so the user can manually combine them or automatically combine the three similar channels into a greyscale file for output. This is what people here are talking about when they speak of "scanning in RGB" or "scanning in greyscale".

Once one understands how the scan process actually works, it becomes very clear why there is so little difference.

Remember that the scanner itself does exactly the same thing every time no matter what the settings are. It is just software manipulation by the scan driver running in the CPU that determines is the file outputted is RGB vs. Greyscale, 8 bit vs. 32 bit, positive or negative, formatted as a TIF, JPG, or PSD file, and other choices.
 
Bob Michaels said:
The scan driver software can be set to either output the individual RGB channels so the user can manually combine them or automatically combine the three similar channels into a greyscale file for output. This is what people here are talking about when they speak of "scanning in RGB" or "scanning in greyscale". /QUOTE]

In vuescan there is an option to select which of the three channels is used for grayscale output. The differences are small, and probably depend on the type of film. Blue is harsher and sharper, Red is a little softer. I usually use Green which which is in the middle. I can image that combining three channels will help in reducing noise, but I haven't had problems with noise, so I don't bother.
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CNNY said:
......
In vuescan there is an option to select which of the three channels is used for grayscale output. The differences are small, and probably depend on the type of film. Blue is harsher and sharper, Red is a little softer. I usually use Green which which is in the middle.
......
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I always use the Vuescan default which combines all three channels with a bias towards the green channel. I tried all the various options many many years ago and concluded that Ed Hamrick knew what worked best more than I did.
 
Not always. Some scanners win on the Blue channel (V7x0, Nikon SuperCoolscan), others on the Green channel.

That's why Ed mixed the channels.
Having a per-scanner default would be nightmarish.

V700, for example, can reach 3200 ppi of actual resolving power on B, yet only 2500 on R.

Fernando
 
CNNY said:
The differences seem pretty minimal to me anyhow.
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I certainly agree with you there.

I am one of those who believes that if what channel you select makes a difference in your photography, you need to evaluate your ability to determine where to stand, where to point the camera, and when to trip the shutter.
 
Fernando2 said:
V700, for example, can reach 3200 ppi of actual resolving power on B, yet only 2500 on R. Fernando
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I think this may actually be shifting focus because of the wavelength of the light. I noticed on my nikon scanner that the IR channel is the softest of all the channels.
 
This is why scanning as "RGB" then possibly select the sharpest channel in PhotoShop is a good option for black and white.

As Bob Michaels wrote, some scanners drivers and softwares are better than others at not deteriorating the RAW data coming from the scanner itself.

For instance with the Minolta film scanners softwares, scanning B&W negatives as "Slides, RGB Tiff 16 bits per channel" is the only viable option not to have the rich RAW data coming from the (very good) scanner deteriorated by the scanner software. You then get excellent Tiff files with lots of headroom for some very good post-processing job in PhotoShop.

Things are different with VueScan and NikonScan (little difference if any between "RGB" and "greyscale" with them).
 
Colors 24-bit with Epson V500 sw as TIFF.

I edit it in LR always, don't care for curves, histogram and such.
I convert it to BW sometimes and two temp bars gives a lot to play if it is TIFF with color info.
Sometimes I do auto color balance or leave it as it is. Gives tones I like.


by Ko.Fe., on Flickr
 
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