Digital BW, The Print

I've been out of it for a while, developing guitars, but I remember that scanners vastly prefer underdeveloped film to dense film. I've been amazed at getting totally useable images from negs that would have been worthless in an enlarger. These were accidents- I'm not advocating deliberate underdevelopment to the extent of the negs I'm talking about, but I am saying that I've seen negs closer to normal that the enlarger would have loved that were too dense in the highs for the scanner, and, unlike with the enlarger: nothing you can do about it. So, if I go back to shooting new film to be scanned, I'd approach an N minus scheme. Not to the accident level, but definitely less than normal for an enlarger.

James

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 2, 2011, at 7:50 PM, Walker Blackwell <forums@...> wrote:

> I develop TMX 100 at N - .5 with 120 film and N - 1 with 4/5. (it depends on lens and camera etc). TMX film has low fog and very articulated shadow detail even at low densities.
> 
> I use Tmax RS developer as 1-shot. This seems to work very well for scanning as positive and inverting later. Minimal curve adjustments needed.
> 
> I also use Lightroom for the first inversion and tonal shifts. It works very well indeed.
> 
> All the best,
> Walker
> 
> 


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