Newbie officially impressed - scanning negs

[omblod]

Hi folks,

Got my first QL17-L around a month ago and so far I've shot about 4 rolls. Great build quality, nice to use but I have to admit I was a little disappointed with some of my low light shots. However...

At first I'd assumed that I'd got carried away with the fast lens and that I'd expected too much from it but that all changed when I scanned some of my negatives. Whoa! That lens does a fantastic job! It seems I'd somewhat naïvely trusted the results from the prints I'd got at a high street photo developers and written off several of my shots prematurely. The negs had a far greater tonal range than I'd thought and I'm now officially impressed.

The reason I'm posting this is that I imagine there are other novices like myself who've been slightly underwhelmed by their photos simply because somebody hasn't done a great job printing them. I'd highly recommend scanning your negs and then printing them after a bit of digital darkroom work. It's definitely worth the effort especially, if like me, you're still terrified of processing and printing yourself!

Do the seasoned pros on this forum agree and if so, what scanner settings would you recommend?

Cheers, Ron.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I agree that commercial procesing is horrid, especially for black and white. But with your scanner you can do better color printing too than the labs will give.

I use a Nikon LS-8000ED and Viewscan software. I don't really do any color balancing or contrast adjustments in the scan software, its much easier and more accurate to do in Photoshop. Scan software applies such changes after the scan is made anyway so you're not getting a better image quality than if you scan using default color/contrast settings then work in PS.

I alsways scan at the highest resolution the scanner can give, which is 4000dpi with my nikon. I have scanned at lower res in the past thinking I only wanted to make a small print, only to decide years later I needed to make a big print...then I had to rescan and redo all the photoshop work i had done...not fun.

Also, scan in 16bit mode; scans always look real flat right from the scanner so you need the extra bit depth to allow for big contrast increases without getting posterization.

Scan in RGB mode for color negs, greyscale for black and white. Contrary to what some think, scanning a BW neg in color does NOT give better tonality...just a bigger file size.

As I said earlier, I use default color and contrast settings. I use the Color Negative setting for color negs, and I use the Transparency setting for color slides and for BW negs. I find I get better quality with my scanner and software using the transparency setting for BW negs, then inverting them in Photoshop...but some scanners have software that does a better job of BW negs so you might try the BW neg setting too.