Scanning Black and White with Silverfast

[omu]

Hello,

i got a few simple questions regarding black and white scanning using silverfast.

First, i always scan as .DNG, would it make a difference if i chose 48bit HDR RAW instead of 16bit HDR RAW for b/w? I mean there are no colors anyway right?

Second, after i import my pictures into lightroom do i still need to do the “Update Vuescan/Silverfast DNGs”? The Color Profile doesnt set even when using this. It does set automatically when i scan black and white at 48bit HDR RAW though. But im not really sure if it does infact make a difference.

Thank you in advance.

[omu]

So it just came to my mind that i can test this easily.

The first image is scanned at 48 BIT HDR RAW
The Second image is scanned at 16 BIT HDR RAW

both converted using the same options.
In the first one where the color profile sets the tones are way more what i was going for.
Does it mean i have to scan even black and white at 48 BIT?

[Digitizer]

@omu

both converted using the same options.
In the first one where the color profile sets the tones are way more what i was going for.
Does it mean i have to scan even black and white at 48 BIT?

One size fits all?
You could try to get a similar result using different setting in NLP and decide afterwards.

[nate]

Hi, sorry for missing this conversion earlier. I replied in another thread with the answer to this:

Using Negative Lab Pro with Vuescan RAW DNG scans

Hi @thobias and all - Just an update here: For whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be a way to have custom DNG profiles for single color-plane files. The DNG spec is always look for 3 or more color planes (for example, R/G/B). This appears to be true even for monochrome digital cameras, like the Leica M10 Monochrome. The profile in Lightroom will always show “Monochrome” with no other options, and the “standard” Adobe tone curve will be built in. That said, I’ve built a preset that will “u…

Basically, the DNG specification doesn’t allow for creating profiles which are only for single color planes (i.e. 16-bit monochrome DNGS). So if you use a 16-bit monochrome DNG, you will notice that the camera profile will never get correctly set to the Negative Lab Pro profile. There is a workaround in the link above, where you use a preset that attempts to linearize the un-profiled monochrome DNG.

Hope that helps!
-Nate