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#11
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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. |
#12
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
I would like to scan the negatives and invert the image for a contact
sheet proof before printing the negatives. This is the only use that I have for the scanner and software. I spent a long time trying to find a way to scan negs on a regular flat bed scanner and it is so easy I didn't believe it when I read that you can just place the negs on the glass and if the backing cover is black place a sheet of white paper over them to reflect the light. Of course it is not needed if the cover is white already. Then most image software can invert the image from negative to positive. I recommend Irfanview which has the advantage of being free. http://www.irfanview.com/ |
#13
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
wrote in message
ups.com... I have a black and white darkroom. I use 4x5, 6x12, 35mm negatives and have two enlargers. I would like to scan the negatives and invert the image for a contact sheet proof before printing the negatives. On the Day Job I do exactly that with an Epson 1640XL with the transparency option. You can gang-scan up to eight 4x5 transparencies/negatives at a time. Doing so many at once means that you make the same compromises you might with ordinary contact printing of so many at once, but it works for proofing quite well. If you choose this approach, and want to use the whole scanning bed, then you will have to buy two sets of negative holders. No big deal, really. |
#14
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
Dick spake thus:
I would like to scan the negatives and invert the image for a contact sheet proof before printing the negatives. This is the only use that I have for the scanner and software. I spent a long time trying to find a way to scan negs on a regular flat bed scanner and it is so easy I didn't believe it when I read that you can just place the negs on the glass and if the backing cover is black place a sheet of white paper over them to reflect the light. Of course it is not needed if the cover is white already. The problem with this method is that you end up "seeing" twice the density in the negative. Think about it: the light has to travel through the film twice, once towards the cover, the next time reflected towards the scanner. So you effectively double (quadruple?) the contrast. -- To the arrogant putzes at NBC: Do we call the country Italia? Is its capital Roma? Were previous Olympics held in Moskva, Muenchen or Athine? Do we call it the "Shroud of Torino"? No! So learn to speak English already and call it Turin. - from someone's blog |
#15
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
Dick wrote:
I would like to scan the negatives and invert the image for a contact sheet proof before printing the negatives. This is the only use that I have for the scanner and software. I spent a long time trying to find a way to scan negs on a regular flat bed scanner and it is so easy I didn't believe it ... Then most image software can invert the image from negative to positive. I recommend Irfanview which has the advantage of being free. http://www.irfanview.com/ I wondered about that. That idea popped into my mind; a white back-up sheet might do the job. I'm going to do some shopping for a better quality 3 in 1 machine. Any suggestions? Dan |
#16
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
Get a used 4870 on Ebay. It will do all you want and more. Furthermore
it will be reliable, simple to operate, and you will be happy. I use one at home and a 4990 at work, in terms of product there's not a dime's worth of difference between them. |
#17
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
David Nebenzahl wrote:
Dick spake thus: I spent a long time trying to find a way to scan negs on a regular flat bed scanner and it is so easy I didn't believe it ... The problem with this method is that you end up "seeing" twice the density in the negative. I've a few where twice the density would be a big improvement. Any scanner with a D-Max capability of 3 or better should handle just about any negative. I think Dick may have some experience with the method. Dan |
#18
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
On 27 Feb 2006 07:43:08 -0800, "Dick" wrote:
I spent a long time trying to find a way to scan negs on a regular flat bed scanner and it is so easy I didn't believe it when I read that you can just place the negs on the glass and if the backing cover is black place a sheet of white paper over them to reflect the light. Of course it is not needed if the cover is white already. Tried this on a 4990 and results were awful. Here are two strips of BW 35 mm scanned as reflective material: http://www.terrapinphoto.com/bw/trix_flatb.jpg Here are the same two strips scanned as transparencies: http://www.terrapinphoto.com/bw/trix_transp.jpg These are both straight off the scanner with no manipulations in Photoshop other than scaling and conversion to JPG. Bottom line: not enough light reflecting off the white background. rafe b www.terrapinphoto.com |
#19
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Advice sought on scanning b/w negatives
LR Kalajainen wrote: 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: Very rarely is it necessary to burn and dodge. Usually this is caused by overdeveloping the film, resulting in excessivly contrasty negatives. Make sure your film speed and development times are accurate for your equipment to give you both shadow and highlight detail on your neg. It would be nice if you told him HOW. When you print, the use of VC paper combined with a split-filter technique will often save you a lot of burning and dodging. Completely false. It makes no difference whatsoever. The silver grains don't care in which order they are exposed. Most prints look just gorgeous when printed at the normal grade (grade 3 for 35mm). 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." Complete bull****. 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. |
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