why scan BW negs as color?

Hi,

I have found that scanning my BW negs under the color negative setting produces much better results. Why is this? Whenever I scan them using the BW setting stuff looks worse.

Robert.

planetrobert said:

Hi,

I have found that scanning my BW negs under the color negative setting produces much better results. Why is this? Whenever I scan them using the BW setting stuff looks worse.

Robert.

Click to expand...

I have actually never tried that. Which scanner are you using?

Nikon Coolscan V ED. My three choices are Neg (Color), {the one i use}, Neg (Mono), Positive, and Kodachrome. I think I must have tried with Neg (Mono) and for some reason it looked worse than Neg (Color) so I stuck with that.

The resulting scan looks very black and white except for some faint color like a very faint tinge of blue or green, extremely faint, which I then remove by desaturating in Photoshop, which, incidentally, reduces the file size by a lot of MBs.

I am using an Epson V500 right now, but it does relatively well. I shoot a lot of black and white film but have never tried scanning any of it using the color settings. I'll have to give it a try to see if it helps. Thanks for the tip.

Another advantage to scanning B&W negatives in color can be sharpness and resolution.

Each of the 3 channels in a scanner has a different sensitivity (kind of like having a different ISO in a digital camera), so each channel will have a different amount of noise. And when scanning negatives, the noise will show up in highlights, where it's more noticeable.

Also, one of the channels may be sharper than the others. This is often the green channel, since it is in the middle of the optical range, and less expensive scanners may have lenses that are better corrected here than at the extremes of red and blue. Typically, if you scan as B&W, the scanning software may take some sort of average of the 3 channels, which may not be optimal.

Software like Vuescan lets you inspect the 3 color channels individually, and choose which one you want to use for B&W conversion.

--Greg

You may also find that the blue channel is the most noisy of the three. I frequently scan as color and drop the blue channel as I convert to gray scale. That averages the red and green which tend to be cleaner, and sharper.

With the V750 I tend to scan as colour and use PS's channel mixer to isolate the green channel. It's definitely sharper than the other two. A simple greyscale conversion gives much softer results.

I'm glad I posted this thread because this will help me figure out whether the Vuescan software I just got can get me results that are as good as what the old Nikon software gave me. Thanks for all the extra feedback. Pioneer, let us know how it worked out.

I will. I have some negs that I developed a while back that need to be scanned. I'll try to get to them this weekend to see how this scanning in color works out.