Process for B&W negatives

[Peter069]

Are there any guides available for dealing with B&W negatives?  I have a large number of 35mm B&W negatives to deal with from the 60's.

I have managed to deal with some of them but I don't think I am obtaining the best final result.  Many of the negatives are marked, covered in white dots, etc.  Most of this I can deal with, slow process but manageable, it the final stage that I feel I need some guidance with, brightness, shadows and contrast in particular.  Images are scanned on a CanoScan 9000F MarkII to Tif as a monochrome negative, greyscale (16Bit), output resolution of 2400 dpi, this gives me a scanned image of 14-15mb on average.

I wondered if I'm on the right track with my scanning and would appreciate suggestions.

I'm using an iMac running OS 11.6.8 Big Sur, 27inch Retina 5K though that does not help with the scanning!

 

 

  

[thomaso]

34 minutes ago, Peter069 said:

Are there any guides available for dealing with B&W negatives?

I appears there are many, for instance …

https://crawfordphotoschool.com/digital/bw-neg-scanning.php

https://www.shutterbug.com/content/b-and-w-negative-scanningbra-step-step-easy-way-quality-images

http://pimage.com/GrayVsMonochrome.pdf

Are the "white dots etc." caused by a chemical process and thus "burnt" in the film – or are they dust / dirt on the film – or possibly on the scanner glass or lens? In case of the latter they will show a common pattern. It may be useful to upload some screenshots to the forum of scan results before they get edited.

[Peter069]

thomaso, thanks for your reply and web links.  I will go through them and see if I can learn something.  Most things that I have looked at tended to be about converting colour to B&W.  Regarding the white dots these are from when the negatives were originally processed in the 1960's.  Along with other marks I am able to remove them albeit a slow and boring process.  

Thanks again, if I get stuck I'll come back for more advice.