A breakthrough in scanning thin negatives

[Kev M]

I have a real problem still in getting my negs right. I night to put some more effort and find out if it's a metering, camera or developing problem but in the meantime I found some really helpful information on the net tonight.

I've been trying to scan these thin negs using an Epson 4490 with Epson scan software setting it to negative film and 16bit B&W. The result were terrible, the scanner was seeing black, black and more black and if I adjusted the histogram to bring out the detail it just resulted in mush.

The trick is to set the software to scan as a positive instead of a negative and then invert in photoshop/lightroom. I've not installed photoshop on my new PC yet but there is one minor problem in ligtroom as it doesn't have in invert pre-set like photoshop does. To invert the image you have to flip the tone curve and this means that all of the exposure sliders have reversed function. Until I sort out my density problems I can love with that minor inconvenience because it means I can now get something out of my **** poor negatives

 

[joxby]

Ahhhh.....well......been there, but did it for a different reason...

So my ancient old Minolta scans a b/w neg and spits out a greyscale file.
Nikon Capture is my go to software but throws a deaf un at greyscale, so for a while I was fannying about with a greyscale conversion before hitting NCap.
Soon got balled off with that so I started scanning 16bit colour to get a file NCap could open straight off the bat, and I think its a better scan all round even if its gigantic....for a b/w neg scan....