ATM I’m solely using Negative Lab Pro for B&W scanning. 48 bit files are overkill for this job. Can you make it a function that a scan be made at 16 bit grey so that then in Lightroom Negative Lab Pro appears as a Profile. Currently it only appears if you scan at 48 bit. The file size saving at 16 bit is large and would def be my preference.
Thanks
Yes, +1 here. Scanning silver as color is complete overkill and becomes problematic with staining developers like PMK and Pyrocat.
You can scan it at 16 bit bw, it will still work just fine. I have tried it and it worked, I just prefer 48 as I do both bw and colour, and I can’t be bothered changing from 16 bit bw to 48 bit colour, so I just scan everything in 48 bit colour.
Have you had any issues recently with the 16bit workflow? For me, the resulting scans appear to be very underexposed once saved from Vuescan and imported into Lightroom. I’ve tested with the same Vuescan exposure settings in Linear Tiff and 48bit Raw and they come out as the correct density.
This seems to be a new issue. Just wondering if you have experienced it?
Sorry, can’t answer this question because I no longer use Vuescan, it was giving me endless problems after the last update, so I have switched to using silverfast and have to say, thoroughly enjoying it.
Keep in mind that some applications can not handle monochrome scans.
Hi guys, sorry for the late reply.
I have added a way to do this (16-bit single-channel mono RAW DNGs), but you have to follow an extra step from the post below to linearize the file (because DNG camera profiles only work on typical 3-plane files).
Hi @nate,
I find this just now. Could you provide the preset in old .lrtemplate format, which is the one needed on CC 6 ? I don’t have a newer Lightroom to do it.
Thanks a lot!
Yes, it is included in the same thread that I linked earlier. Here is the link to lrtemplate format:
(note, I removed your link for security purposes)
well, it was a week I was using the separately generated lrtemplate file … Instead of spending time sweating on the Adobe specs and API for the XMP, I just used the Giovanni Allievi converter (in Java), cheap and handy for any case of presets from guys who forget about the pre-7.3 LR versions.
@nate I see the profile for DNG, but is there a way to keep 16-bit b&w RAW files 16-bit on conversion? Converting and saving a positive tiff copy of a b&w shot results in an RGB colorspace tiff. I feel like the B&W profile we select prior to conversion should save converted 16-bit scans as 16-bit files…
Currently I’m just using a photoshop batch action to convert the positives back to 16-bit greyscale which works just fine, but would be nice for the output to match the input tiff type.
I believe you are asking if there is a way to export single-channel grayscale images in Lightroom (single-channel is a separate thing from bit-depth). I don’t believe there is currently a way to do this in Lightroom, but I may be able to build it in to the custom Negative Lab Pro export options (i.e. “Export B+W Images as Single-Channel Grayscale”). I’ll have to look into it.