B&W processing and scanning help sought.

[Joanna Carter]

They have dip and dunk b&w processing at this pro lab in Brighton

Hi Bip

This message doesn't seem to fit the conversation, are you sure you are replting to the right thread?

[Joanna Carter]

Let me start by syaing that what follows is meant to be constructive criticism, not destructive

One neg, that I thought was underexposed and looks very,very thin, actually seems to scan OK, and with a bit of masking and separate curves for f/g and sky looks like this

I would have said that, unless you want the "heavy" appearance you have given this image, that you could have got a lot more detail and tones.

This is only one half of the neg - but you get the idea. It's got 'interesting' focus as the camera was almost bent in half with a 210mm lens and a very low view point.

Once you get the hang of movements, you should find that such extreme "bending" is not necessary for landscape shots with foreground interest; you appear to have a limited band of in-focus, possibly due to the narrow depth of field the movement you applied has induced.

Neither of them register dynamic ranges greater than about 150/256 on the epson software, even though they seem to have too much range to 'print'.

Here is the histogram from a full range neg that I have just scanned to demonstrate some of the settings in the Epson software :



What you can't see is that the scan was done as a 16bit B&W negative, not as you did yours as a colour scan. Also the Epson software is set to "Expert" mode.

Note that the lower sliders are set to 0 and 255; it is important that you always do this, even though the Epson default is to bring them in as some sort of automatic exposure setting.

Next, you will see that the sliders on the histogram are set to be just below the lowest black level and just above the highest white level; the centre slider controls the gamma (contrast) and, in this case is set to 1.50 because that gave me the fullest range of tones in the preview window :


The setting of the centre slider for any particular neg will depend on the tonal range in the neg; I have had it vary from around 1.20 to 2.40.

Also notice here that the selection rectangle is inside the image area, ensuring that the edges and notches on the film don't affect the black/white points on the histogram; the rectangle will be set to cover the whole neg, including edges, for the final scan.

Now, in the case of this particular image, the resulting scan, without any modifications, looks like this :



... and in the case of this particular neg, which was amazingly well exposed for me , all that was needed was a slight curve to get a result like this :

So, does this sound 'right'? Am I on the right track? Is it completely unrealistic to expect to shoot B&W without a fair amount of post processing to get a printable result?

If you shoot right, develop right and scan right, then you will need less work in the editing software but, just as with wet printing, you will always encounter some negs that can take a great deal of effort to get right in the editing software, even if you try to do as much as possible in the scanner driver.

You must use a spotmeter and learn the zone system in order to control the tonal range and content of the negative, otherwise you are expecting the scanner driver to make a silk purse out of the proverbial sow's ear. You can get away with using a DSLR as a spot meter, just be aware that it will usually have a 5 or 10 degree spot rather than the usual 1° spot most of us are used to; but if you can zoom into an area to meter it, you should get a fair approximation.

[buze]

I made a "Black & White Scanning Workflow" tutorial some years back : http://oomz.net/bw_workflow/

I still use it exactly as such, it's the best quality/price process I found...