Scanning b&w negatives: dazed & confused

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Iridium

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I have got an Epson V700 with Silverfast SE in order to get the best value for money scanning of my negatives for archival purposes at most.

As I am not a photoshop geek, I have been looking around the forums to get information regarding possible methods to digitalize b&w films. However, the different recommendations confused me rather than helped me.

Some people recommend to scan the negative as colour RGB instead of grayscale and then to convert the image in photoshop. Others say no, it’s better directly at grayscale 16bit (if possible). I noticed, though, that the image is darker when you scan it as RGB than grayscale and the shadows loose detail.

Some more propose scanning the b&w negative as positive image so as to keep all of the details that a frame contains and then conversion at grayscale.
Afterwards, different opinions also on making corrections. On the one hand curves, levels. On the other, from grayscale to duotone and then back to grayscale or by assigning profile. Then, unsharp mask vs smart sharpening; saving the final image at sRGB vs Grayscale, etc.

Can anyone give me his point of view on scanning b&w films on an effective and simple way?
 

JBrunner

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Hi! This is a topic for discussion over at DPUG.
 
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