Digital BW, The Print

----- Original Message -----
From: "Truman Prevatt" <tprevatt@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 7:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Film for scanning was Re: The State of
PersonalScanner Technology


> At some point the film response to light goes nonlinear which results in
> the "toe" and the "shoulder". My initial thoughts - yet to be tested end
> to end without a good printer - was if you kept the image mostly within
> the linear portion of the film response you could expand it to get both
> shadow detail and hightlight detail.

Truman,

None of the modern films has a shoulder to speak of and density is linear to
exposure. However there are other limiting factors and experience tells me
that the thinnest possible negative that retains all the desired detail
yields the better print. There is latitude but I think that this may still
hold for digital as well and is a function of the chemical nature of film.
The toe does remain though but I wonder if PS doesn't give us a way to
straighten out a good portion of it.
>
> I think if you use film and a scanner there is another calibration step
> to the zone system - camera, film, developer and scanner.

Exactly. Which also speaks to the benefits of doing and controlling your own
scanning. In all fairness though I have not had any problems scanning
negatives that yielded good prints in the darkroom. So while additional
optimization can be done, I don't think that we are too far off the mark.

Martin Wesley

>
> Martin Wesley wrote:
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Truman Prevatt" <tprevatt@...>
> > To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> > Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 2:39 PM
> > Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Film for scanning was Re: The State of
> > PersonalScanner Technology
> >
> >
> > > That's basically the way I worked when I was printing silver prints.
And
> > > it works quite well. But given the extra control one has when the
image
> > > is in the digital form, it makes me wonder if compressing the negative
a
> > > bit, scanning and processing in 16 bits would not give better results.
I
> > > don't know yet. When I finally get off my duff and get a printer, I
can
> > > test this a little better.
> > >
> >
(snip earlier)