Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: B&W photo scanning question

This is topic B&W photo scanning question in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 06-25-2003, 10:09 PM:

Weird question for Joe, Bobby, etc.:

Why do black-and-white photos always seem to look like crap when scanned and viewed on a computer monitor? The scanned versions always seem to look flat, lifeless, and dull while real 8x10" prints from my local lab look great. It doesn't seem to be an issue of resolution alone, because scanned color photos usually look pretty decent.

Lately I've had a bit of a B&W photo fetish, shooting lots of Tri-X and some Tmax as well. It's frustrating, though, to get really nice looking prints and then scan them to email to friends and end up showing off a version that doesn't look anywhere near as good as the original.

Does anyone have any tips for getting decent-looking scans from B&W prints? Or will B&W photos always look bad when displayed on color monitors?

edit: Here's an example (below), although it's really necessary to see the original print to see how lousy the digitized version looks by comparison:

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 06-25-2003, 10:24 PM:

Could be that the grey scale capability of your scanner is just not even close to the gamma range thats in your print. Scanners will sometimes make B&W scans that look somewhat compressed in the greyscale range. You can try the gamma adjust feature in Photoshop to see if you can pull things to make them look better. Also, your video card and monitor need to have VERY wide range in grayscale and be set to the correct color temp. for best results. Try having the lab to a drum scan at full resolution. It should look VERY good. It will also be a huge file and cost probably around 30 bucks to have done. I've seen B&W done digitally that looks great, so I know its possible to do it...
Remember the contrast range capability of digital video as compared to a photograph, B&W or color, is very limited to begin with.
Mark

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 06-25-2003, 10:39 PM:

Thanks, Mark...I think you answered my question. Now that I know that good-looking digital B&W is possible, I may have to try having a few prints (negatives?) scanned professionally just to see what the results look like.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 06-25-2003, 11:16 PM:

You definately want to scan the negs. When I have just one 4X5 transparency done at full resolution it pretty much fills an entire 100mb ZIP disk!!
Mark

Posted by Christopher Duvall (Member # 284) on 06-26-2003, 03:05 AM:

Try futzing with the contrast or Histogram funtions and also scan the photo at full color because greyscale may compress the greys. The downside of scanning in full color is if you are slighly off in calibration, you may end up with a slight tinting problem... here is an example of what I did...

This photo was scanned and was left untouched.

Same photo but I killed the saturation and screwed around with Histogram. Just a quick job but it gives you an example of what you can do.