Old B/W negatives, tips needed

[Bearthunder]

I've got a load of old 6 x 9 cms old B/W negatives I want to scan. I've got a Canon CanoScan 9000F Mark II flatbed scanner. But, I'm a total novice when it comes to scanning. Having bought and played around with SilverFast, I now have more questions than answers.

For one, which bit setting should I use? Scan it as color or B/W? I had a look at the Lynda.com video about scanning with SilverFast, but it didn't seem to have anything about B/W negative scanning.

So, anyone have some good tips for me?

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear customer,

If you want to save B&W images in 24 or 8 bit.
Which one you want to use depends on your personal taste and the size of the saved images.
24 bit color images retain the slight blueish or greenish tint some B&W images have while 8 bit B&W provides a true B&W image.
8bit images are also smaller than 24 bit images.


Kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

[Bearthunder]

OK. I was playing around with the b&w bit settings, and found a very weird problem.

Scanning the negative in 16 -> 8 bit saves the image which is normal to view.
Scanning the negative in 16 bit HDR saves the image in an inverse view.

Both are saved as reflective negatives.

Trying to invert the 16 bit HDR image in Photoshop gives me a very very light picture, and a lot of the details are lost.

As I'm saving images for archiving and possible future editing I would like to save the files with as much detail as possible, i.e. 16 or higher. So what should I do to save the b&w scan (from old negative film) with as much details as I can get?

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear customer,

The 16/32/48/64 bit HDR(i) formats are archive formats.
These are saved unchanged for later processing in SilverFast HDR (Studio)

Kind regards,
Arene Ketelhohn