I wrote a post nearly eight years ago on how to use Vuescan with a Minolta Dimage 5400 to get amazingly good scans of old images, but this doesn’t quite work for Black and White mainly because the Filter Infrared is off for Black and White scanning.
So if your images are pretty clean then you can use the advice in Crawford School of Photography to get a good scan or since bits really aren’t that expensive, you can just scan in “color”
But if you don’t have scratches to summarize the advice:
- Scan in BW Negative
- Choose 16-bit grey scale which is like 16-bit color
- Infrared cleaning does not work because the metallic silver interferes and you get funny tonality, but if you have C-41 films like 400CN, then you can use it, but you need to flip to color to enable the filter
- White and Black Points, set the clipping to zero. The default is 0% for Blackpoint, but 1% for Color
- Pick Grey as your colorspace, you don’t
- Make sure to set the TIFF file type to 16-bit too, you have to do this twice once for the scan and once for the output.
- Set Jpeg type to Black and White
- Set the Film to Tmax
