On Wed, 30 Jan 2002 07:12:44 -0800 Ken Durling (kdurling@earthlink.net)
wrote:
> I know the processes
> are very different, but would those difficulties translate to inkjet
> paper? Or is the home digital dkrm workflows the same as any B&W
> film?
Yes, although the extreme luminance range which chromagenic films are
capable of capturing (and scanners can successfully transpose to digital)
can create some extra problems.
That is, a wide-range image can look very flat and dull if you set the
black and white points to retain that range. Colour neg is much the same,
for the same reasons - a huge range of luminances is being compressed so
much it looks lifeless.
There are various ways of dealing with that. The crudest is to clip the
shadows and highlights and throw away some of the range (and detail). This
is what colour tranny does so well ;) and why it looks lively and saturated
in comparison.
Being a bit more sophisticated, you can edit the luminance curve. Whether
you compress the shadows and/or highlights, the gradient in the midtones is
the key, usually, to acceptable tonality.
You can go further still. It's often relatively easy to get good shadow and
midtone tonality, but then find the highlights are blown. So take a copy of
your unadjusted scan, mask off all but the highlights with a soft mask,
then use levels to get them looking good and paste them as a new layer
into the version with the decent shadows and midtones.
I've been printing bromides for 30+years, and doing this sort of stuff is a
revelation. Revisiting old and sometimes difficult negs I find that I can
get much, much better results by scanning and tinkering like this. If you
start from a well-exposed chromagenic B&W neg the amount of usable tonal
information available is astonishing. But don't expect to just be able to
scan it, do a quick levels tweak and print it out. You have deferred a lot
of the creative decisions to on-screen which at one time (or if you shoot
reversal) are irrevocably made by exposure/development. This happens to
suit me fine, but a lot of people see scanning as mechanical drudgery and
just want a literal rendition of what's on the film as the endpoint.
Printing is another can of worms entirely, and Art has described some of
the frustrations. None of them are related to the film type though; if you
can get what you want on screen, someday you'll be able to print it <g>
> If not, are there recommended papers to print C-41 with on an
> inkjet? I'm using an Epson 820, FWIW.
Regards
Tony Sleep
- Online portfolio & exhibit; + film scanner info
& comparisons
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