The Great B&W Scanning Bake-Off ...

[dmr]

dmr... this and the more recent threads are really exceptional work and a lot of effort. I'm the kind of user who just scans, crops and saves for the web.

Thanks {blush}. I hope others can use this information. I'm trying to learn just what this thing can do, and what quirks it has, and although I've had excellent results printing the color scans I've done on it, I've maybe printed 1-2 B&W ones total.

Occasionally I've played around with the positive vs negative thing but haven't been methodical. Either I liked it and proceeded or reverted.

Back when I first got this thing and tried it on a few B&W negatives I did try positive and invert but I really didn't see much difference at all.

Now that I'm finally scanning a bunch of my old B&W negatives I was curious as to just how much difference there was. I'm still not sure, but I do have a better idea of what's going on.

 

[amateriat]

<snipped>
I'd suggest scanning in 8 bit ... there's no point going any deeper for B&W most of the time. Also, I'd suggest reducing the oversampling to single pass or 2 at most. While good for colour, I've found the multipass reduces sharpness in B&W.

Peter

Scanning in 16-bit, IMO, is essential for an image file you'll be massaging in PS without doing unnecessary file damage. Once the editing has been done, you can reduce the "working" file to 8-bit for printing (although there's a bit of controversy about this, as some, possibly including myself, believe sending a 16-bit file to the printer results in better quality output - I'm not preaching about this, but that's how I do it for b/w. Don't see a difference with color, BTW).

As for the 3 scans, I say: 1, 3, 2.


- Barrett

 

[jlw]

Since this seems to be a topic on which feelings run high, you might want to post the scans WITHOUT indicating which was done with which method.