B&W Scans on 4870 with SilverFast

[Jeffrey Sipress]

Using SilverFast Ai presents many options. A ton of them. I'm scanning 4x5 B&W negs, and wonder if anyone has had great success with particular settings that really matter. Naturally, I want superb tonalities throughout the image. Currently, I'm setting it at 16 bit, 2400 dpi, Q-1.5, screen 1600, to yeild about a 300 MB file, which I'm after. Anything particular to avoid, or to absolutely include? Thanks in advance for saving me days of random experimentation.

[evan clarke]

Hi,
I have been using Silverfast many years now and I always allow it to do the interpolation. If the image is going to be output at 16x20, 360 dpi, that is the size setting I use. It must be resized somewhere and Silverfast does an excellent job..Evan

[Ralph Barker]

A couple of things I've noticed using SilverFast with a 3200, that may or may not have been changed with the 4870.

First, the Epson instructions may indicate to scan with the emulsion side "up". Doing so produces "right-side" scans in which text and such will be properly oriented. Sowever, scanning with the emulsion side down, and then flipping the image in Photoshop produces sharper scans.

In SilverFast, watch the output black and white points - the slider bar below the histogram. They may be placed inside the max points by default, but you may want to move them to the max points, 0 and 255, to make maximum use of the available digital palette. Although I wouldn't call it "interpolation", I also set the output size and resolution (DPI), and allow SilverFast to calculate the necessary input resolution at which to scan.

If you have problems with the scanner seeming to introduce grain when scanning B&W negatives, try scanning as a positive, being sure to reverse your thinking about the histogram points, and then invert in Photoshop. The SilverFast preview will be a negative image, but you can make your settings adjustments to provide a "good" negative - what you'd look for in the negative for conventional darkroom printing. Also, I usually scan as RGB to avoid the limited tones available in the grayscale palette. Otherwise, you may get "banding" in large areas of subtle tonal variation (e.g. seemless backgrounds).