B&W negative scanning on NIkon 4000

[Photo Fitz]

Hello, and I hope that scanning is not a bad topic for this forum.

I currently have a Nikon Coolscan 4000 and I use the Nikon scanning software. I primarily scan color negatives and transparancies. No major issues with this.

I have tried a few B&W negatives and find my best results when I do the following:

* Turn off ICE
* Set bit depth to 14 bits
* Set to RGB

In photoshop I set the black and white points and levels in the Levels adjustment.

If I use Gray Scale the result is bad.

Can anyone describe their formula for success?

Thanks,

- Alan

[Jorge]

:rolleyes:

[SIZE=7]APUG[/SIZE] [SIZE=6]ANALOG PHOTOGRAPHY USERS GROUP.[/SIZE]

[Amund]

Hello, and I hope that scanning is not a bad topic for this forum.

Actually, scanning is something not discussed here, so you`ll be better off asking over at photo.net or similar..

[Dave Parker]

Don't know if it is bad or not, I do know that digital Ice will not work with traditional B&W or Kodachrome, this particular was designed for the newer C41 type films, the reflective properties of B&W as well as Kodachrome have to much reflectance, even when I worked on the local lab, we alway turned off the Ice feature when making prints from slides or negatives from traditional B&W...

R.

[jd callow]

This is a grey area topic and belongs here... (welcome back Jorge!)

I would try scanning in 16bit or RGB, don't do any contrast or density operations within the scan software except to bring the end points to the edge of the histogram (this is just as easily done in PS and allows you to do further corrections). Unless you are in a production environment where you need to process many files and just be close, it is far better to do raw scans (over sampled and with no corrections) and do all the sizing and density corrections in software built for it.