Finally, I'm getting scans, especially, black and whites, that are meeting my expectations. How? You ask. First, under prefs/color management I set it to use my calibrated monitor icc profile. Second I'm scanning everything including b&w negs as color with all settings except Ice checked (when doing b&w negs though it works with chromogenics). Works fine! Here's an old Tri-X neg scanned with the above settings ...
Excellent! You see what I meant by "HP5 is all what Tri-X should be"? Kodak changed the Tri-X look over the years and it's now foreign to what it was. The HP5 is the closest thing to what you're showing. Beautiful...
Thanks Ned! But don't forget that I always pulled film in bright light. This was shot at ASA 200 and underdeveloped 15-20%! Gotta maintain some shadow detail and keep those highlights under control. :biggrin:
Here's a slide done after using the monitor profile in color management. I purposefully used a slide with a high contrast and tricky lighting.
Looks like it works well Ray. I'm not completely happy with my scanning as yet, so your experimentation may also pay off for me!
Yeah Chris, I'm going to keep at this until I can get predictable, consistent results. I've even been thinking about trying out trial versions of Vuescan and Silverfast. Until I started using the monitor profile all my b&w stuff was coming out flat and needed too much processing in Photoshop. Not anymore, just a few small tweeks in levels and curves needed now.
Any of you use Bibble Pro? I have been using the Ansel Pro plug-in for Bibble and frickin love it. I can get that nice pop that I haven't been able to get with PS2.
You convert to grayscale in photoshop??? I always had that same scanning in color vs. scanning in b&w debate with my coolscan....
Yes, Gavin, I'm converting to greyscale in Photoshop! I'm scanning in as a 16 bit color neg. If you have a calibrated monitor I think that you should use its icc profile in color management as this makes a huge improvement in the accuracy of the scans.
yeah, I began doing that since I read your thread... Im still not very happy with the scans. There's something lacking.... I'm not very fond of the grayscale versions.... dunno exactly why, they just look a bit flat. And the color versions are very sepia. Right now I'm desaturating each photo manually to almost the point of true grayscale. And don't get me started on the coolscan and its perfect rendition of every F****** scratch and spec of dust there is!!!!!!!!
Another thing you can do is use the grey eyedropper in curves to get your greyscale and then convert to greyscale,
At school I've been scanning in color and then converting in photoshop to a monochrome. Works really good for me.
