black and white negative scanning.

[peterlee10]

My Plustek 120 scanner has just been ordered from the Australian Distributor.I spend a day down in Sydney with them test scanning before deciding to buy one.Results were pretty impressive- scanning BW negatives @ 5300 dpi and then reducing them to 3240 dpi.I only shoot black and white and was using the Kodak T Max 100 profile and print all my work myself on a Epson scanner.I did notice that there was no real way of setting black and white points (there may be I just didn't know where to look) and this resulted in some highlight blowouts , small but important to me.Presumably there are NO clipping warnings in Silverfast (pity) and no way to do full manual scan in Silverfast A1 Studio- I want a linear scan to taike into Photoshop.
The other alternative I thought would be to scan as a colour negative ( hopefully with better control over WP and BP), take the linear scan into Photoshop then use the green channel only.
I am not worried about file size, speed of scan - I just want the best quality linear scan I can get.
I do have v**s**n which allows me to end up with a linear scan , no clipping etc which I can use if I have to.
Any suggestions ?

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear customer,

You can set the shadows and highlights both manually and automatically.
To automatically set them you can use the image auto adjustment.
(The Auto button right next to the prescan button.)
Click and hold it to open a list of additional automatic correction types.

Manually setting the highlights and shadows is possible in several ways.
Either use the Pipette tool to the left of the preview area to define them in the image.
Or open the Histogram and move the markers below the histogram curve.

The above settings change the transformed image data which NegaFix produces.

You can also directly change the highlights and shadows in the original curves.
To do so open the NegaFix expert settings (doctor hat icon) and switch to expansion.
Here you can see how the "Tolerance" slider adjusts the highlights/shadows markers for the three RGB channels.
You can also adjust the values manually by dragging the lines.

The Curve defines how the conversion process takes place.
If you want a linear conversion choose the following:
Vendor: Other
Filmtype: Other
ISO/ASA: <Linear>

Kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

[peterlee10]

Thank you for that excellent explanation.This was my only concern with Silverfast which I otherwise found very intuitive to use - until I tried it the other day I had never seen or used it before but the workflow was set up brilliantly.Whilst on this subject I assume as I only shoot black and white there would be no advantage in me upgrading to Silverfast HDR and Achive suite as this seems to be pitched for those using colour- bit the same as the auto IT8 calibration.

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear customer,

The SilverFast HDR Studio / Archive Suite is not limited to processing color images.
You can also use it for processing B&W images.
But you are right, you would probably not need many of it's features if you are only scanning B&W.
It could help if you have to process a large archive because it helps to do the scanning and processing separately.
This is often faster because the scanning involves a lot of manual tasks and can be completed faster when scanning into raw format.

The IT8 calibration is only for slides, that is correct.

Kind regards,
Arne ketelhohn.