Digital BW, The Print

On 10/05/2010 Michael wrote:
> Is the lesson to be learned this: when the original scene is very low 
> contrast and the darkest point is equivalent to a mid-grey, scan the 
> negative so the midpoint slider points to the lowest end of the 
> histogram mountain? This seems to prevent the scanner from making 
> these mid-grey areas from turning pure black.

Pretty much, yes.

I don't know Epsonscan (despite having a V700, I use Vuescan with it
and other scanners).

You need to control scanner exposure so that your zoneV darkest shadows
remain ZoneV in the positive scan, whilst capturing all highlight detail.
Restricted density range in the neg should make this easy, since the
scanner's OD range will exceed what's on the film.

Scanners apply a simple gamma function that does not cope well with the 
densitometric curve of B&W film. B&W film is non-linear and designed to 
work with inversely non-linear bromide paper. Scans that place highlight 
and shadow points correctly will usually look flat and horrid in the 
midtones because of this. The solution is to scan for maximum tonal 
information and expect to have to adjust levels *and* curve to get a 
better combination of shadow separation, highlight detail and midtone 
contrast.

It's usually impossible to achieve all this at the scanning stage, better 
to scan at 16bits and do the tweaking in PS.

-- 
Regards

Tony Sleep
http://tonysleep.co.uk