charlienow wrote:
I have scanned all of my old B&W film from many years ago...there needs to be some processing on them to get them where I want them...
I'm wondering what the best Post Processing Software might be for these scans...or are they all about the same...
Thanks for your advice
Chuck
The ultimate *for me* has been a combination of Adobe Lightroom Classic (LrC) with Adobe Photoshop (Ps). It's $10/month.
LrC is a parametric editor. You move sliders for lots of control over exposure, black level, shadows, highlights, white level, saturation, hue and tint (white balance), sharpness, noise reduction, etc. But you can also crop, size, spot, remove red eye, and do some rudimentary masking. It's also a catalog tool, completely non-destructive, has a full-fledged printing module and a great export tool, and does everything a pro needs for cull editing, making proofs, and cataloging all images.
Ps is a bitmap (pixel level) editor, with layers, masks, text, filters, and lots of tools for local area modifications and adjustments. It is decades old, so it is full of tools for all kinds of needs. It can be a "black hole time sucker" that consumes you! That's why I use it very sparingly. Most of what I need to do with my images, I do in LrC.
My setup is using a digital camera with macro lens to make raw files of my slides and B&W and color negatives, then edit them in the Adobe suite. A key element is the Negative Lab Pro (NLP) plug-in for Lightroom Classic. It is one of the most important tools for working with B&W and color negatives that I've ever encountered. I ran a scanning department in a major professional lab back before digital cameras got popular, so I know quality when I see it! NLP rivals Kodak's legendary Bremson HR-500 lab scanner output from DP2 lab software.
I've attached a white paper on my "camera scanning" workflow that you might find interesting. Open it in your favorite PDF reader. It contains many samples and a pretty full explanation of what I do.