Greyscale of colour scan, which is prefered?

[Mailio]

Hello.
Usually i tend to scan my photos on the colour setting, but i've considered switching to grayscale because of the scanning duration being shorter, as well as the file being smaller. But comparing them, i feel like grayscale results in a much flatter image, i assume it's because it has less tonal range? Here are two examples to compare


IMO his head pops out a little more, and his features look a little more full in the colour one than the grayscale

It's even more visible on the second image, with grayscale everything sorta blends together, and much of the depth is gone.

I apologize for explaining it very badly, i don't know many photography terms. I know the difference isn't much, perhaps to some irrelevant, but i would like to hear your opinions on the matter.

[MAP]

My preference is for the soft toned photo's.

[Witt]

I have always scanned my photos on the color setting. Never tried grayscale but I can tell a difference on your side-by-side comparisons. The grayscale is working in the same manner as the color setting except the varying amounts of brightness are being compressed into the range of gray shades. That is why it is not as sharp because there is less variance in the range of brightness.
It usually takes at least five minutes per scan for me but that is the price I pay to get satisfactory scans. I like to have high resolution, clear scans to improve viewing of details and background aspects. Many photos have presented interesting background details I never noticed before blowing up the scans on-screen.

[MJie]

I haven't used grayscale scanning before but from the photos above I would prefer the colour ones.

Mjie

[Kohima]

It sounds like you have already made your mind up, Mailio!
Colour was always my favoured setting, too, and for the same reasons as pointed out by Witt.

A nicely illustrated comparison, by the way.
All the best,
Rob

[BlackCat1982]

I agree that scanning is colour mode does seem to be better than grayscale - I expect someone somewhere has done a test using a range of scanners at various budgets. But a very visual post that illustrates the differences clearly.

[Mailio]

Thank you all for your input, i appreciate it!

Kohima i think you are right, i will stick to colour. Reading the comments, i see there's a strong agreement that colour gives more to the image, it was mainly the size and duration of scanning that made me consider grayscale. Think i'll just buy a new HDD for storage, and just deal with the time it takes to scan them.

Witt, i completely agree! The detail hunting is one of my favorite aspects of photo collecting. It's incredible how many things you find when zooming all the way in.

Thank you everyone! I'm happy you guys like the comparison. I'll post one more image just for good measure; Now that there are two closeup photos, one taken further away and with more background seems fitting.


while digitalising i also discovered one more thing; colour scans seem to have less hard "breaks", where the pixels line up too perfectly and create a unpleasant looking line in the image. While they also do happen with colour scans, it looks like they have it less often. In this zoom, you can clearly see it on the man's nose and visor in grayscale, while in colour they are absent there but exist on the edge of his visor. Luckily those are just minor things, which you'll only encounter when zooming in closely. I figure if you're really dedicated to digitalization, that you could combine the images to fix things like that. But for me, that's a bit too much work haha


Friendly cheers from Denmark