Digital BW, The Print

Hi Michael,
I have the images on the house computer but will move them later out to the studio.. But I did look at the files.. First I feel the scans should have been quite different given where you took it.. A note on scanning.. I try to never scan for a pure white or black in a scan I set my scanners up to back off a bit. The reason for that is white and black basically have no information and once it's gone it's gone.  The foreground snow will print basically paper white with no texture at all and snow does have texture to it.. 
Ok so what I also did was opened up your PSD scan and final files and put them next to each other .. Using Levels first I got the image on the same page as your finished file, followed by a curve tweak then a contrast bump a slight clarity bump I got to your image pretty close except I didn't go quite as white with the snow as you did..  then I then made a quick sharpening mask ( I do this using a channel..) so maybe 8 / 10 minutes max.. Note this was a down and dirty effort but it looked ok.. In all fairness I was using your finished image as the target so I didn't have to invent where I was going that made it a lot easier for me. 

So more later  after the I wrap up with the farrier (it's horse shoeing day here)..  

So a quick recap... and this is intended to contribute.. It pretty important to have an idea of what you want the image to look like when your doing the scan.. I've not seen the neg but I'll bet it's not the same as the scan.. Regardless the vision starts in the scanning stage rather then trying to "fix" a scan in PS.. I saw no reference to levels in your workflow doc... that was the first thing I used.. followed by smoosing it a tad using curves.. then the rest.. but the image was basically set up towards a known target after that ...then it's just quality improvements to get it where your happy with it.. and playing a bit more in the detail.. What version of PS are you using?  Lastly, especially an image such as this one I like making a custom sharpening mask in a channel ..Once you get used to doing that it goes really fast.. The plus to it is that you can easily erase areas that you don't want to apply any sharpening such as the snow or sky or?? an  by removing more of the mask you can selectively sharpen certain areas twice to sneak in another bump if it's appropriate.

jimbo ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: michael3442@... [DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint] 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 8:09 AM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Workflow assistance?


    
  My files are uploaded to Dropbox and can be downloaded to check them out; right click on each file and choose download. On Dropbox, the tif & psd thumbnails & previews do not display properly but the jpg previews are fine. Once downloaded, all files open properly in PS.  I'm looking forward to hearing your comments. Here's the link:

  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j69xl4gurq2qq3c/AAANyw2ul8DMccYnfcggENmya

  Michael K

  
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