Capture One - scanned Black/white negatives

[Doug A]

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Capture One is a parametric editor (like Lightroom). Affinity Photo is a pixel editor (like Photoshop). Each type of editor can do some things more easily than the other type can. For example, instead of reversing the black and white points and monkeying around with reversed sliders to invert a digital camera scan with Capture One (or Lightroom) a single click of the Invert control in Affinity Photo (or Photoshop) does the same thing and the sliders are not reversed. This one difference alone was enough to get me to try Affinity Photo and once I figured out what layers were all about I had no interest in going back to Lightroom. 

Epson printers use color inks when printing B&W images, which are more accurately called monochrome images. I know this for a fact because I never make color prints but the color ink levels in the printer do go down albeit more slowly than the black and grey inks. And nothing I have read suggests that Canon printers don't do the same thing. 

Edited January 11 by Doug A

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[250swb]

28 minutes ago, Doug A said:

Capture One is a parametric editor (like Lightroom). Affinity Photo is a pixel editor (like Photoshop). Each type of editor can do some things more easily than the other type can. For example, instead of reversing the black and white points and monkeying around with reversed sliders to invert a digital camera scan with Capture One (or Lightroom) a single click of the Invert control in Affinity Photo (or Photoshop) does the same thing and the sliders are not reversed. This one difference alone was enough to get me to try Affinity Photo and once I figured out what layers were all about I had no interest in going back to Lightroom. 

Epson printers use color inks when printing B&W images, which are more accurately called monochrome images. I know this for a fact because I never make color prints but the color ink levels in the printer do go down albeit more slowly than the black and grey inks. And nothing I have read suggests that Canon printers don't do the same thing. 

‘Invert’ in Photoshop can work remarkably well, if the starting image is very average and with no clipping issues. And after that ‘Auto Color’ can clean things up. But it isn’t reliable as a part of a workflow, far better to invest in some dedicated software (until Adobe solve it).

And yes printers do use an array of inks just to produce B&W, it’s about getting the density of the pigment. However in traditional B&W silver printing the colour was never pure greyscale, each paper type would vary between warm or cool in tone and this is something many people fail to replicate with inkjet printing.

[Doug A]

9 minutes ago, 250swb said:

‘Invert’ in Photoshop can work remarkably well, if the starting image is very average and with no clipping issues. And after that ‘Auto Color’ can clean things up. But it isn’t reliable as a part of a workflow, far better to invest in some dedicated software (until Adobe solve it).

And yes printers do use an array of inks just to produce B&W, it’s about getting the density of the pigment. However in traditional B&W silver printing the colour was never pure greyscale, each paper type would vary between warm or cool in tone and this is something many people fail to replicate with inkjet printing.

Agreed. Invert (or reversing the black and white points) is only a starting point for producing a color image. And the dedicated software you mention is certainly the way to go for color negatives. But I only work in monochrome. I find that with with RAW scans from an X-trans camera I can do all that I want with Affinity Photo to produce a final monochrome file in the sRGB color space and with Epson Print Layout to produce a final monochrome print using Epson's ABW. 

Clipping is seldom an issue with dedicated film scanners. But it is fairly common with digital camera scanning if the output is a JPG file. The solution is to use auto exposure in the camera to center the data in the histogram and output the file as RAW. I have never seen clipping with even the highest contrast negatives when I do that with a Fuji X-trans camera. 

[Chris W]

Like I said, I just scanned a hundred black and white negatives from the 1990's. I'm doing a book.

I'm a fan of Capture One. Reversing the levels takes less than a second (two clicks), not sure why a single click would drive someone to Affinity???

If my B&W has a slight colour cast in C1 it doesn't bother me one bit. Once inside the program I select the B&W option in the colour window.  I often also use one of C1's 'Beyond B&W' presets as a starting point, but you don't have to.

I was editing a TIFF in C1 yesterday.

Something is off if none of this works, as mentioned, probably in the scanning stage. I just scan as a normal digital camera capture. Like I said, if you feel it has some c colour in the scan, just switch to B&W in your editor during the processing stage.

I have printed off finished edits on an Epson P600 and they all look great.

 

Edited January 20 by Chris W

[ApoVision]

My workflow: use CaptureOne just to take (thethered shooting) photos of the negs (always DNG), then export the files (unfortunately C1 follows the catalog approach) to a directory, open with Adobe Bridge/ACR/PS (do NOT convert to BW), crop, invert (CMD+I), then adjust curves (CMD+M) and use SilverEfexPro to further process (SilverEfex does NOT work if files are converted to BW before). Results are great, I use M11/SL3 with Micro Nikkor and wait for my Novoflex to use my Apo-Macro-R 100mm with the SL.

Anyone tried Filmomat to make scanning process more efficient. Struggling with connection between Filmomat and camera bodies to trigger shutter automatically

[Sharpdressed]

I suggest anyone using Capture One for scanning film to check this free app:

https://michael-wilmes.format.com/toolbox

I find it really interesting and I hope you'll support it.

I either use this or Iridient Developer for developing scanned film dngs.

Best,

Manu

[abb-strack]

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I know this is an old thread but capture one does not support/offer editing Tiff Images scanned in grayscale. I ran into this same issue about a year ago and decided to move my film scanning workflow over to lightroom because they do support editing my 16-bit grayscale images and I didn't want to have to jump back and forth between programs for color and black and white images. 
 

Sounds like there are other programs that might as well i put in a request for this feature with capture one but so far no dice.