appalachian outing Appalachian outing.

From my first scans of black & white negatives. It could take me years to go through my books if I don't refine my methods.

These are scanned as b&w negs; I tried RGB and it looked like it was gonna take 15 mins. so I stopped. I tried b&w positive and the images looked like gray mud.

What frustrates me most (along with curved film), is the middle grays. In the darkroom compressed tonal values mean no black and/or no white. But these scans have full black & full white, with the middle values flattened!

I had no problem making a nice print of this image in the darkroom, but have to push levels all over the place to get any pop out of it digitally.

If you scan black & white film, what do you do? Thanks.

Regarding your question; I have probably less experience than yours but here is my two cents worth of opinion: The last time I had my B&W film scanned I have made it done at a professional place using a "drum scanner". They only wanted to know how "wide" would I be printing the scanned files. I lied them! (I might have said 40cm, perhaps). The results was quite satisfactory for me. Still, I had to play with levels&curves and the like... Below is such an example:http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6692631