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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.

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

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