Scanning B&W with Vuescan - skill me up

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dave_whatever
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Scanning B&W with Vuescan - skill me up

Post by dave_whatever » Thu Jan 19, 2012 11:40 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

I thought I'd throw this open to the floor. I've shot and developed a few sheets of FP4+ which I acquired with a camera. Never really shot proper B&W before.

Anyway, I've come to scanning them. So just wondering how people go about scanning mono these days?

My current E6 scanning workflow is pretty standard - scan in vuescan with the 4990, no adjustments, and output a "raw" (in inverted commas...) tiff file with a colour profile for velvia embedded (which I've previously created from a faust IT8 target), and then do all the work on the scan in some other software, like photoshop/gimp or these days Aperture. Obviously I can bin the colour management step for mono, but anything else I need to be aware of - is outputting from Vuescan in 48bit still advisable? I've also turned off ICE as its not supposed to work with monochrome film. Any other tips? Is leaving the levels and/or black and white points till "post" rather than setting in the Vuescan still the way to go?

Sorry if any of this is a daft question. After shooting exclusively colour transparency for years, the fact that the light things are dark and the dark things are light is kinda blowing my mind a bit. Its like driving in a mirror.

ian-barber
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Re: Scanning B&W with Vuescan - skill me up

Post by ian-barber » Mon Jan 02, 2017 9:15 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

With Vuescan, I find it easier not to do any adjustments in the software. Make sure you scan 16bit greyscale and then do the correction curves in Photoshop

rhodej00
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Re: Scanning B&W with Vuescan - skill me up

Post by rhodej00 » Thu Jan 26, 2017 5:25 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Hi. The Vuescan Bible by Sascha Steinhoff, who created Vuescan, suggests that the negative is first scanned at 4800 spi to produce a RAW file, a .dng. Then this RAW file is scanned to produce the jpg/tiff file. Also this gives you a RAW file which can be used in A.N.Others RAW file converter software.
I have used this method which works OK but is new to me so I am still learning.
Might be worth getting a copy of the Vuescan Bible-about £20 I think.

Vuescan gives lots of options so much experimentation may be necessary to suit your own requirements.

John
John H Rhodes
http://www.johnhrhodes.co.uk
Scottish Photographers

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