Epson B&W 4x5 scanning, now I'm pissed!

[Eric Rose]

So all the collective wisdom said, scan as colour negs and then strip out red and blue in PS. Well I did just that. I had one negative that just would not behave when scanned in colour neg mode, colour 48 bit. So I switched to B&W negative and left it at 48 bit colour. I noticed the scanning process took almost twice as long! So my little brain (no not that one! ) said, hey I wonder if it will be sharper?

So I did a test. Picked a neg that was easy to scan in colour neg mode, 48 bits colour. Scanned it both ways and the scan where I picked B&W negative is WAY SHARPER and has better DR. WTF! So 140 4x5 negs later I find that I have been scanning at a lower resolution than I thought I was. If any of you have taken the time to scan 140 4x5 negatives you know just how much time I have wasted!

Here is a screen shot of the two scans. Both have had the blue and red channels stripped out. As you can clearly see the scan on the left is far better. That is the one where I picked B&W negative, 48 bits colour.

 

[Kino]

Forget it , im tired

 

[mmerig]

Why not scan with one channel (like green), in a gray-scale color space? What is the advantage of using 48-bit color on a monochrome image? I am hardly an expert on scanning, but I find it much easier, faster, and I get decent scans by keeping things simple. I had a similar experience, using a "conventional wisdom" method, and I just could not get good tonality without lot of fiddling around, and even then I had problems i could not fix (mainly poor separation if higher tones). So now I am doing many scans over the simpler way.

 

[Eric Rose]

In another thread I detailed my experiment on just using the green channel during scanning. I got better results by scanning rgb and then using PS to strip out the channels I didn't want.

All this aside I think I have now got the procedure down for what I need to get top quality results. The scans I got were not bad, just not great. They will be good enough for web display but not good enough for creating prints for sale.

 

[Eric Rose]

Forget it , im tired

Me too.

 

[jim10219]

I'm sorry you're having to go through all of this. Unfortunately, I think most of us can relate. It took me about a month of scanning nearly every day, about 3 hours a day before I finally settled on my own personal scanning routine. I wasted a lot of time scanning the same negatives over and over again before I finally got each step figured out, and still occasionally manage to screw things up. Scanning is a bit of an art. Everyone has their own techniques, and there's really no right or wrong way to do it, so long as you wind up with the results you desire. But once you get your system figured out and all of your presets and automation squared away, it's not too bad.3

One thing that I find helps is to not waste too much time trying to get every negative print worthy. It can take me hours to get a single negative ready for print. So instead, I've developed a system where I scan every negative and then use a bunch of PS automations to get the negatives ready for posting online. After that, I'll sort through all of those to figure out which, if any, are actually print worthy. If I find one that I deem worthy of a print, I'll set it aside for later. Then later on, I'll usually work on one of those negatives in PS while I'm scanning others. Often times it'll be a negative I scanned several days or even weeks ago. That way I'm doing two things at once, and not having to sit there and wait on the scanner. Plus I wet scan, which is a bit of an ordeal in and of itself.

 

[Eric Rose]

#jim10219 . Thanks. When I say good enough for print, what I mean is it's good enough to spend the time getting it ready for print. Wet scanning, now there is something I need to learn. What scanner do you use? I have an Epson V750 Pro.

 

[winger]

I have always told it I was scanning a B&W negative and then used 48 bit color. I make it B&W in PS or Elements using whatever method makes it look right to me. But I'm usually scanning just for online use because I still print in the darkroom (which I'm doing today - YAY). I've had a few printed and they were fine to my eye, but they weren't huge prints. FWIW, I still use an Epson 4870 scanner.

 

[faberryman]

It is unclear to me why scanning in black and white would be sharper than scanning in color, whether you use one or more color channels.

 

[Pioneer]

For my use the only advantage I have found to scanning a black and white negative in color is that it allows me to modify the contrast by using the different color channels. For my work I have not noticed any difference in the sharpness of the scan, but the speed of a color scan can be slower.

In most cases I just scan black and white as 16 bit gray and color as 48 bit color. I use an old Epson V500 for medium format and 4x5 and an old Plustek 7600i for 35mm so perhaps the newer scanners are working differently.

 

[Saganich]

Thanks for posting your experience...someone has to get to the bottom of this b&w scanning business. If its any consolation I have about 12 years of wrongly scanned negatives...but its getting better all the time

 

[Patrick Robert James]

It is possible that the Epson software is combining all three channels.

I've always found better results with black and white, regardless of the scanner I used, when I used Vuescan. You might want to try it.

 

[jtk]

So all the collective wisdom said, scan as colour negs and then strip out red and blue in PS. Well I did just that. I had one negative that just would not behave when scanned in colour neg mode, colour 48 bit. So I switched to B&W negative and left it at 48 bit colour. I noticed the scanning process took almost twice as long! So my little brain (no not that one! ) said, hey I wonder if it will be sharper?

So I did a test. Picked a neg that was easy to scan in colour neg mode, 48 bits colour. Scanned it both ways and the scan where I picked B&W negative is WAY SHARPER and has better DR. WTF! So 140 4x5 negs later I find that I have been scanning at a lower resolution than I thought I was. If any of you have taken the time to scan 140 4x5 negatives you know just how much time I have wasted!

Here is a screen shot of the two scans. Both have had the blue and red channels stripped out. As you can clearly see the scan on the left is far better. That is the one where I picked B&W negative, 48 bits colour.

View attachment 218915

I think you were previously victimized by online advice from people who didn't realize they were using the wrong tool (the scanner itself) for post processing.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

So all the collective wisdom said, scan as colour negs and then strip out red and blue in PS. Well I did just that. I had one negative that just would not behave when scanned in colour neg mode, colour 48 bit. So I switched to B&W negative and left it at 48 bit colour. I noticed the scanning process took almost twice as long! So my little brain (no not that one! ) said, hey I wonder if it will be sharper?

So I did a test. Picked a neg that was easy to scan in colour neg mode, 48 bits colour. Scanned it both ways and the scan where I picked B&W negative is WAY SHARPER and has better DR. WTF! So 140 4x5 negs later I find that I have been scanning at a lower resolution than I thought I was. If any of you have taken the time to scan 140 4x5 negatives you know just how much time I have wasted!

Here is a screen shot of the two scans. Both have had the blue and red channels stripped out. As you can clearly see the scan on the left is far better. That is the one where I picked B&W negative, 48 bits colour.

View attachment 218915

Ahhh, if you’re going to be scanning BW negs with an epson scanner, I highly recommend getting Vuescan, then scanning as a monochrome positive transparency in raw mode using only the scanners blue channel. Then in PS or LR invert it and adjust the gamma/exposure to taste. Vuescan let’s you do this pretty trivially.

Now, why only use the blue channel? Blue is shorter wavelength and gets more fine detail through the scanners optical system which results in sharper scans. This is easy to test. Do one using only the red channel, then the exact same one with only the blue channel. Scan at the scanners native sensor resolution. The blue channel one is noticeably better.

Another upside, because it’s monochrome, it’s about as fast as it’s going to get for scan speed.