[filmscanners] Re: comments on using NikonScan/PC

["Dieder Bylsma" <scanners@spacemoo.com>]

>There is an incredible amount of detail that can be pulled out of
>even the most dense or thin negative.
>
>Dieder,
>
>Would you say this applies equally to scanning slides?

yes I would say that, having just gone through a set of slides and
negs whose subjects were snowy scenes in daytime and at night. i.e.
both extremes :-)


>
>Now here I would have thought the opposite. Let's say the original scan
>had little room on the white end... no true whites but close. Wouldn't
>increasing Analog Gain quickly push the light levels up to begin burning
>out the near-whites?  Using greypoint restricts the brightest pixels and
>thus would seem to limit this risk. I'd also think that curves can do
>what you say, but without the risk.


well, Nikon's software insulates the user from the vagaries of
remembering that slides are positives and negatives aren't. :-)

My fault for not explaining it properly...

what I mean to say here is that if your 'clouds' on a 'slide' are
burnt out even with the finest of sliders and curve adjustments, that
you can 'decrease' the analogue setting to a suitable point to where
the clouds start getting less 'blown out'

On the other hand, given an underexposed (negative/positive) you can
still pull a fair amount of info out of the darkest areas given an
adjustment with the analogue 'gain' buttons to the opposite extremes.

short example as per my 'flash bleach' where I salvaged a very usable
picture out of a picture that was mightily over-exposed. Likewise,
with a very dark slide (indoor church shot) I pulled out a fair
amount of detail, albeit not enough to make it look like daylight,
more than enough to make out the shadow details.

best way to go about this to confirm what I have talked about it so
get a negative and/or transparency and do some experimenting yourself
an see how and when to use 'analogue' gain.

One last example: sunset/sunrise pictures. I like seing my
sunsets/sunrises as orange balls of fire. But the default scanning
setting at an analogue setting of '0' does not permit that, instead
trying to expose the whole scene and ending up with a sun that is
pure white. Crank the analogue setting down to -1.5 or so, do a
secondary scan, and then I have the sun as a nice orangish ball of
fire with some cloud silhouettes over it that otherwise would not
have been there. Mash the two photos together in photoshop (in 16 bit
mode of course ;-) ) and I have a nice sunset/sunrise. On that one
scene I max out the analogue gain to a certain level to get the most
shadow detail I can, I minimize it to get the most detail out of the
sun, and then use the default setting to get a standard amount of
detail. Between the three of those scans there's a picture there that
I can create which represents what I remember seeing when I took the
picture :-)




Dieder

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