nikon coolscan BW scanning tip...

L

lex

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while i agree that these are not the best scanners for BW, i came upon a working solution for scanning BW with a coolscan (4000 ed in my case) and vuescan. most BW i have scanned has had the highlights blown to no avail. i was scanning some neopan 1600 (thin!) and i could not tame the highlights. then i simply locked the exposure and manually adjusted it fairly low as well as lowered the analogue gain. during the scan the image look too dark to be useful, however when it inverted the image an applied the film profile the highlights were intact and i had a rich histogram. the grain was huge but it is 1600... i think most of the time the scanner exposure is too intense for BW and needs to be turned down. good luck!
 
If you use Vuescan you can set the white point to say .01 or .1 to avoid blown highlights. Same with the black point. You'll get a flat looking scan, but can then use curves in Photoshop to give you the look you want.

I've scanned lots of b&w negatives without clipping.
 
thanks for the link to that great tutorial! my workflow actually includes most of what was in there, however i always got blown scans. taking the exposure way down solved this problem for me...
 
Have you tried messing with the film type? Set the brand to Kodak and the play with the various D-76 and T-max CI settings looking at the histogram until you get an unclipped one. Noise ninja does a fine job with the worst of the grain (which I fear is actually grain aliasing, I have to try other scan resolutions as an experiment...).
 
mfogiel said:
lex,
take a look here:
http://www.filmlives.net/community/viewtopic.php?t=594&sid=fc3bba0ae1a0cd3fa6e9a90ff60ed4c8
Click to expand...

I was trying to follow film profiling scan procedure as described in the link. Downloaded the trial version of Vuescan - got $ singns on the scans and cannot open saved TIFF files in PS. Instead of opening them (TIFF file - scan in Vuescan), PS insists on New image file opening. Probably because of trial version of Vuescan. Quite annoying.
Can't see the reason to buy the software if I cannot try it out and ensure it is good and suits my needs...

Alex
 
I scan with the Nikon software, but as a colour neg in 14 bit mode - it seems to extend the dynamic range. I leave the scanner adjustments of levels and curves to off and just apply a light unsharp mask to bring back capture sharpness.
Most of the time I get a nice warm look to the images so I don't even bother to convert to grayscale afterwards.
To minimise the grain I set the image parameters to 8x12 inches 300 dpi, so the scanner isn't running at full tilt. It gives very crisp results without excessive grain.
The final adjustments are done as a 16 bit Tiff in PS but don't usually need much of a curve adjustment.
 
I usually scan stuff on my DS IV in color pos mode and desaturate and invert. I was trying to do some stuff fast last week and decided to scan pos to save time. I would have thought they would be similar, but they weren't.

Average scenes were OK direct, but not perfect. One shot with slightly blown highlights looked horrible in direct mode, no matter how I tried to tweak it. It looked posterized and odd, no matter what I tried to do. I thought it was lost, but then I switched back to color pos mode and adusted the exposure till I had a pretty good histogram. Took it to PSE and inverted and desaturated it and then used a curves plug in to tweak it. Viola, a usable image, still not the best, but better than I could have burned and dodged in the darkroom.

I assume this tutorial posted would work for any scanner that can use VueScan?

Mark
 
My scanner is an Epson and I do not use Vuescan, yet this thread probably will be useful. Thank you, all.
 
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