Black and white scans... and Capture One Pro

ChrisR

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There's a bit of background here that I have to get through before my request for help. Some of you may remember that, being a contrarian by nature, I'm an ardent fan of Apple's Aperture, and have carried on using it despite the complete lack of development over the past 5 years. However, Apple have now announced that Aperture will not work on the next version of MacOS, 10.15, known I think as Catalina. (A lot of other things will break as well including my scanner, since they won't support any 32-bit code, but that's another story...) I've always thought that, when it got to this point, I'd just carry on using Aperture and sticking with the current version (10.14, Mojave). But there was a problem with my Mac last winter, in the course of which I had rather suddenly to move to Mojave, and something like that could happen again. I've also realised that my Mac is a mid 2014 model, and could potentially fail. If I got a new model, it would very likely be running Catalina. So, I really have to get a move on and work out a plan on where to go from here. I have written a thread on this in the editing software forum (https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/t...-macos-10-15-so-what-next-capture-one.690117/). So, why am I mentioning this here?

Being a contrarian, the software I finally settled on was Capture One Pro. I got a month's trial and did some limited testing, then a 50% discount was ending and I bought it. Now I've been doing some more serious testing, including importing my entire 2019 folder of Pentax film scans into C1Pro from Aperture (supposedly with many of the adjustments intact). The colour scans all went across fine, but almost none of the black and white scans did. I finally sorted out a way to get them across, but then I discovered that almost none of them are editable!

The ones that are editable were frames I scanned as positives in order to do a separate inversion later (a trial that didn't really go anywhere; Vuescan does a pretty good job). It turns out, those were scanned as colour, 24 bits to a pixel. The black and white negatives were scanned as greyscale, 8 bits to a pixel. For some reason, it appears that C1Pro has never been set up to edit greyscale images with 8/16 bits per pixel! (I have a bug report in to test this out, but this is what I've been informed by a member of their forum, and is consistent with my testing).

As far as I can tell, Silverfast 6.6 scanned all my black and white images as 24 bits per pixel, but the trial of SF 8 that I looked at earlier this year scanned in 8 bits per pixel.

Anyway, does anyone know of any tools that will convert an image from greyscale to colour, ie from 8 bits per pixel to 24 bits (or 16 to 48 for the rare 16-bit TIFFs)? And, more particularly, do this in a batch mode for some thousands of images?
 
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There is a programme I use on Windoze called Irfanview (is free) that will do batch conversions including colour depth - it says on site that can run on a Mac using WineBottler/DARWINE - whatever they are,
 
Surely Photoshop's the thing? You could set up an action and then run it on a batch. Easy?
 
1) Record "Image > Mode > RGB" as a new action.

2) Run it on a folder - "File > Automate > Batch ..."
 
Thanks for the ideas.
Surely Photoshop's the thing? You could set up an action and then run it on a batch. Easy?
I don't have Photoshop, but have confirmed that both Affinity Photo and PS Elements 9 will do the job on a single image. I can't see a way to record an action on PSE 9, need to check with Affinity Photo... yes it appears that AP can record macros and run them on a batch, not sure how easy that is, though.
Just recalled another I have used that does run on Mac - https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/
This one does look good, and it's free! I think I'll give this a try since it's designed for this sort of task. EDIT: It's even supposed to be in the Mac App Store, although I've had yet another recurrence of the problem that means I can't open it. Have to dive in and delete a file somewhere...

I also remembered GraphicConverter, which I used quite a lot in "the old days". It would probably do the job, but apparently it's shareware but US$40...
 
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So xnconvert does the job very easily, just select one option, point it at a folder on disk and go. It took 5 seconds to convert and save 37 images, which is OK. I'm guessing I'd better do on pass per project, ie film, just to keep things equivalent. C1Pro seems able to edit the resulting images. Thanks folks...
 
OK, it's easy-ish, but to get all dozen BW folders in my Pentax 2019 set done was a bit of a faff.

I've also been experimenting with the conditions in Vuescan that trigger the problem. In scanning to JPEG, the answer seems to be to set the "Bits per pixel" in the Input tab to 24, and to untick the "JPEG black/white" check box in the output tab. I've also got "Output color space" [sic] in the Color [sic] tab set to sRGB. I've now saved those and few other options as VuescanBW24, so next film I should be able to get set up more easily.

So far none of my "scan to TIFF" options seem to have worked properly. However, since I don't normally do this, I'm not really bothered enough to pursue it further.

So now I'm going to trash the current Capture One Pro catalogue, and have another go at importing the Pentax 2019 referenced files from Aperture.
 
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