So while producing a flat scan would be frowned on in industry terms, it ultimately allows for greater accuracy, and lets be honest an easier job, when done at home. If you’re scanning black/white negative film, first check to see if the film looks gray or orange to the naked eye. If you can’t find a film type that exactly matches the film you’re using, experiment with the Kodak T-Max settings. Then go to the Color tab and choose a Black/White film type. And obvously if you were scanning commercially you would want the final high resolution scans to come out 'finished' so no pp was necessary. If it looks gray, set Input Media to B/W negative and if it looks orange, set it to Color negative. You still need some sort of universal setting for batch scanning a roll of film. All these things apply to people working on their own on individual scans, as most photographers do when they pick one or two to scan from a roll. Likewise the colour can be much more easily corrected in post processing than in the scan. It simply requires a leap of faith that you and Photoshop (or Lightroom) can organise it all properly in post processing. So if you have something tricky to scan, and can't stop the blacks from filling in with your regular settings, then going flat isn't a problem. It works the same although you have colour balance to think about as well. That is, having a "dull" scanned image with minimum clipping, and then adjusting in PP with LR or PS. I find your comments interesting, and wonder if they also apply to color slides or color film. Steve, I mostly shoot color (E6) and scan with a Plustek 7600. With the photograph in Photoshop you have the options of 'Auto Contrast', 'Levels', or 'Curves' to adjust the tones to normal, I usually start with Levels. It does no harm starting with a horrid looking flat scan, you are sure to have all the information possible in it from the scanner, and Lightroom or Photoshop are far better at adjusting the tones than trying to get it spot on in the scanning software. When you have the black and white points set you can use the brightness slider to tweak the mid tones, but try to keep them 'mid', nothing extreme. And the facts you are working to in this case are that you know for sure you won't be clipping anything at all because the scan is going to look grey and horrible. During scanning I think you want to work purely on facts, and not try to 'pixel pick' using a crude histogram to try and perfect the image. This is the safest way to scan and removes nearly all the human judgement that can make a wrong call. I set the black point to 0 and the white point to no more than 0.25, but most often 0. You mis-typed Mike, you mean the sliders in the 'Color' menu, and yes it is confusing that it comes under colour even for a B&W scan but they do have a big impact on the finished scan.
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