working space for BW scans

[Carioca]

Hi,
I have started scanning some of my BW negs (as greyscale, 16bit). There is no color space assigned, so when I open them in PS, I'm asked which working space I would like to assign - dot grain, or gamma 1.8 / 2.2. What would be a suitable solution?

Thanks for your replies.

Sidney

[Walter Calahan]

Macintosh - 1.8

Windows / Intel - 2.2

Me, I scan B&W as a color neg and use Adobe RGB 1998.

[Carioca]

Thanks!

I have scanned about 180 negs the past few days...I have to stick to greyscale for the sake of HDD space...

Sidney

[Scott Kathe]

Sidney,

That's a lot of scanning. For what it's worth I'm just a beginner but I have found that scanning as a negative in RGB gives me sharper scans and I will have the same file size as you.

I scan as a color negative and in Photoshop I use the Channel Palette to split the channels into red, green and blue. The green is always the sharpest for me with my Epson 4990 flatbed so I throw out the red and blue channels and keep the green channel. It is now a grayscale file made from the sharpest channel and will be the same file size as your grayscale scan. Others have found the green channel is usually the sharpest at least with the scanner I'm using. The scans definitely take longer and the process is a little bit more involved but you can get a little more information out of your negatives that way. Is it worth it? Only you can answer that. I do it but I wouldn't go back and redo the number of scans you did.

Hope that helps,

Scott

[Ron Marshall]

It is a tiny bit more work to extract the sharpest channel, but the scan is noticably sharper and, as Scott has said, the same file size.

[Carioca]

Thanks to all for your help!

I have experimented a whole day with all the options proposed and, indeed, the green channel in most of the scans seems to be the best choice. It actually depends on the subject you are scanning, in the case of smooth skin tones, sometimes the red channel was the better option.
I have a Nikon V Coolscan and checked results with the Nikon driver as well as Vuescan interface. Somehow, I was pretty disappointed with the latter, giving me very flat scans not recoverable in PS. (I have tried ALL settings, Col neg/Slide/BWneg chosing only one of the 4 channels offered, etc....)
In the end, I rescanned only my most important scans with the RGB option and the Nikon software.

Sidney

[Scott Kathe]

Sidney,

I should have qualified by post by saying that my main subject is nature/landscape photography. With one of my waterfall shots all the vegetation disappears from the red and blue channels. Intuitively I would expect that but none-the-less it was quite startling.

Scott

[Scott Rosenberg]

i'm a little late to the party, but there's an article on the main page quite germane to the topioc at hand...

http://www.largeformatphotography.info/1800F-bw.html

[Scott Rosenberg]

Has the fundamental question of the thread, ie which color space to use when working in grayscale, been answered? It’s a non-issue if you scan in RGB, but once you discard the two inferior channels and then convert to grayscale, you’re right back to where Sidney was at the beginning of the thread, and the question remains, which colorspace are you using? I’m by no means an expert on the matter, but my research has shown that the answer isn’t always as simple as Mac versus PC, in fact, some say that it depends on your color working space. Here’s a pretty good read…

http://www.schewephoto.com/workshop/CM-for-BW-Sidebar.pdf

Personally, I use ProPhoto RGB for color and Gamma 1.8 for grayscale on a PC.

[Ed Richards]

"Gray Gamma 2.2" in photoshop.

[Carioca]

Thank you all again for your feedback!

The links were very helpful.
Some prefer Gamma 2.2, other suggest Dot gain 20%....I guess best is to conduct tests and find out individually. The latter option and description is found at this link: http://www.cjcom.net/articles/digiprn4.htm

My goal is to have the best BW output on an Epson 7800 printer, eventually with Piezography inks.


Sidney