Digital BW, The Print

Jean-Marc,
I tried the Silverfast demo on my Nikon and was disappointed by the frequent
crashes it caused (PS 5.5/Mac OS 9.1 at that time) and what I found to be a
not exactly intuitive interface. The film presets are a nice convenience,
but I shoot just a few stocks regularly and have worked out my own
adjustments. My 2 cents.

I am having excellent luck scanning negs as positives in 3.1.2, then
inverting in Photoshop. Sometimes this makes a big difference, sometimes not
so much. The main improvement I notice with certain films is an end to the
sort of muddy, underexposed look I used to get with negs that I knew were
perfectly exposed. As for the deepest blacks, aren't you limited by the
slight tint of the film base? I think you'll have to make a shadow levels
adjustment in the scan software or PS.

One other thought--have you ever tried a side-by-side test of scans done
with different levels of multisampling? I did, and found that in 99% of my
scans, anything over 4x made no noticeable difference. I still use 16x
sometimes, but it's more out of superstition than any hard evidence. ;-)

Regards,
Doug

> Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 14:18:22 +0200
> From: "Loris Medici" <loris.medici@...>
> Subject: Re: For those using the Nikon ED 4000 to scan B&W negatives
> 
> 
> See Silverfast Ai 6.0 @ http://www.silverfast.com
> It is a very powerful tool (for negatives especially)..
> I scan as Grayscale negative (using specific profiles for 50+ films) and
> output 16bit to PS. Very smooth and wide histograms...
> 
> Regards,
> Loris.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jean-Marc Humbert" <humbertjm@...>
> To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 12:39 PM
> Subject: [Digital BW] For those using the Nikon ED 4000 to scan B&W
> negatives
> 
> 
>> Dear all:
>> 
>> I've been using the Nikon Coolscan ED 4000 for 18 months only to scan
>> B&W negatives (Agfa APX 25, TMax 100 and 400) to print them on A4/A3+
>> papers (using mostly the PiezographyBW plugin with MIS Quad inks).
>> 
>> I use Nikon Scan 3.1.2. (I have tried Vuescan but was not convinced).
>> 
>> ...
>> - the poor histograms I obtain in PS
>> - the gap in shadow area (from 0 to 25/30, no data at all!) which is
>> quite annoying for printing with the PiezographyBW plugin since it
>> requests strong blacks...
>> 
>> Is there any tricks I missed?
>> 
>> What are your settings when scanning B&W negatives?
>