Black and White Magazine Scanning

[ripchord]

Hey scanmeisters - any advice on how to get good black and white scans (I have a number of cherished Parliament publications) would be appreciated. I've tried a number of different approaches, but none is fully satisfactory (at least to me).

Over to you. Thanks in advance!

[adzart]

Depending on the scanner and software, and also the quality of the original picture, I find that the scanner has difficulty in determining the grey parts but that can be altered in the scanning interface sometimes.
Scan decent size, even if its a large scan, you can mess with it more acurately, then just resize it to post, I scanned some B/W magazine stuff and it needed a "descreen" filter that was in thy scanner interface - still had to use "curves" in the app "Paintshop ProX2" to alter the contrast but it was fine then.
Scan at least 600dpi so its nice and detailed.
I did a scan of a pic recently
http://img218.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=60855_Vintage1_123_405lo.jpg
and it took a bit of "cleaning up" what with the scan picking up the "dust" spots on the original picture.

[ripchord]

Thanks for this, Adz. So you scan at 600 dpi, descreen (I can do on the scanner or in Paintshop Pro X - this is the app I generally use) and then resize - the image you posted was 650 x 1000.

Do you scan in colour and then convert? Before or after descreen? Or scan 256 gray shades?

Thanks for your help with this. Rip

[adzart]

I scan in B/W Greyscale, and experiment with the descreen settings, in the scanner interface, then paste it into PSP as a Tif, then faff about with the curves or Histogram, to get it looking OK, possibly also using salt and pepper filter to clean it up, and THEN I resize it, it all depends on how good or bad the original pic is, the one I posted was a "bitty" pic and all the contrast was too dark giving the whole pic an over exposed look.
I tried scanning in colour then converting but I preferred to scan in B/W(greyscale) as it kept the background neutral and was easier to get the blacks correct.
Oddly enough my scanner has gone tits up, (its been on the blink for a while, a mechanical fault, due to a problem in the scanning arm)its over 4yrs old anyway so I am on the search for another, and one that must have the facility of slides and negative scanning, the Epson V300 fits the bill with a dpi of 4800 x 9600, but trying to find one in stock is a prob as most of the shops just don't stock 'scanner only' devices.