Since the negatives are so old, you might check if there is any color cast to
them due to age. You might consider scanning in color so that you have 3
channels to work with rather than just the one grayscale.
As to which software to use - I am staying out of this one.
Maris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mário Teixeira" <mjteixeira@yahoo.com>
To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2001 1:43 AM
Subject: filmscanners: Scanning B&W negatives
After scanning almost exclusively slides (with my Microtek Artixscan 4000t)
, I will begin with my old B&W negatives (several hundreds), mainly Ilford
FP4 and HP5, many of them more than 30 years old. A very, very hard
"retouching and archiving era" is coming and it will be a pitty if, in the
end, I will discover that I must repeat "da capo" ONLY because... my
scanning tecnich was faulty.
I intend to: scan at 4000 ppi, gray scale 16 bits; "dynamic range" --
automatic, but all the other tunings in the scanning software (including
unsharp mask) disabled; save the raw scans as TIF. I don't intend to "work"
the photos in the scanner, but after in Photoshop.
As scanning software, I have Microtek ScanWizard Pro, VueScan and SilverFast
Ai 5. My experience is only with ScanWizard, that I used for all my slide
scans. My main question at this time is if any of the other programs is
superior to ScanWizard (just the quality of the "raw" results). But all your
help and suggestions for my "scanning phase" would be much appreciated.
Best regards,
Mário Teixeira
mjteixeira@yahoo.com
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at
