Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives

While burning and dodging will always be necessary tools in a wet
darkroom, a couple of tips from a 35-year vet may be helpful:

Make sure your film speed and development times are accurate for your
equipment to give you both shadow and highlight detail on your neg.

When you print, the use of VC paper combined with a split-filter
technique will often save you a lot of burning and dodging. If you're
using multicontrast filters, give one exposure with the highest contrast
filter and one with the lowest. Arrive at the times through running
test strips of each. If using a colorhead, give one at full magenta and
one at full yellow. When doing your test strips, you'll want the yellow
(lowest contrast) exposure that will give you the desired amount of
detail in the brightest highlights (excluding specular highlights, of
course) and with the magenta (high contrast) exposure, the desired
amount of detail in the most important shadow areas. Example, 12
seconds magenta and 6 seconds yellow at f/11 or whatever f stop you
prefer. You'll be amazed at how quickly you'll arrive at a really good
work print, and how little final manipulation of burning and dodging
you'll have to do. You can burn or dodge to increase or decrease
density increasing or decreasing both exposures. You can burn or dodge
to increase or decrease contrast by increasing or decreasing only one of
the exposures. Takes a little practice to get your head into it at
first, but will save you a lot of pain and time and paper when you do.
And, it will give you visible improvement in the local contrast, i.e.
the contrast within a given tone in the print. This will give your
prints that luminous glow--- make them "sing."



Rod Smith wrote:

In article ,
Craig Schroeder writes:


It might be a
reflection of my darkroom skills, but I've actually gotten some
hard-to-print negatives to deliver better via the scans and deliver
good tonality on the printer that I wasn't quite getting in the
darkroom... It takes a bit of courage to admit that publicly!



What I've found is that a scanner (or my Minolta DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 as
driven by VueScan, anyhow) is very good at extracting the full scale of
densities from a negative, compared to printing. This is most commonly
noticeable in scenes with cloudy skies; a scan produces noticeable, and
even dramatic, detail in the clouds along with a good range of tones
outside of the sky. A print of the same negative produces little or no
detail in the clouds and/or lost detail in the shadows. The only way I've
found to recover detail in both areas in the darkroom is to burn the sky
in. (I've less than a year's experience in the wet darkroom, though;
perhaps there's a technique I don't know about that'd do the job.)

That said, scans of B&W negatives just don't cut it when it comes to
recording subtle tonal changes, particularly in dark areas (of the final
images; light areas of the negative); they tend to break up into harsh
pixel patterns, and printing on an injet printer just makes it worse.
Thus, with a little burning, I find it's usually possible to get superior
results in a conventional darkroom. I've a couple of negatives I have yet
to print satisfactorily in the darkroom but for which I have good scans,
though. Still, I do expect to eventually learn enough to get them done.