Digital BW, The Print

Andre

There is not much out of the ordinary in the workflow I am using.  One important thing I did when I got the Epson 3200 scanner was get the Silverfast IT8 calibration feature enabled and calibrated the scanner.  This has meant that the transparency and reflective scans are now pretty much correct from a colour perspective straight from the scanner.

The Church shot was taken on Velvia.  This 6X6 transparency (as with the 6X6 Portra negative) was scanned using the medium format holder that came with the scanner.  I must say that for a budget scanner the holders are very well designed and keep the film very flat, at least to the eye and I think the depth of focus is sufficient for any slight deviation from true flatness.  I know that Alessandro has shown that oil mounting can produce sharper scans with better contrast but I haven't attempted that yet.  The scan was done at 3200ppi and resized to 800 pixels in PS.  As for cleaning up the image, a slight magenta cast was removed with Pictographics Editlab 3.0 and it was sharpened using UltraSharpen Pro.

The Portra negative was more of a challenge, as Portra has proved to be on many scanners I have used.  The Negafix module of Sliverfast Ai has Portra profiles but they are pretty near useless, although I have tweaked them to some degree and they are better than nothing.  I have found that Vuescan can produce very nice Portra scans but for this one I did the following (which produces slightly better results).  I scanned in Silverfast Ai as RGB positive and used the 48-bit HDR (raw) output from Silverfast.  This file I inverted in Photoshop and then adjusted the levels by selecting red, green and blue separately.  I then used Editlab to remove a slight red/magenta cast, resized to 800 pixels and sharpened with UltraSharpen Pro.  This image was slight better contrast than the Vuescan image, but they were close.

I am very pleased with the 3200.  I have used a Nikon 8000, Minolta Multi Pro, Polaroid Sprintscan 120 and Flextight Photo.  The 3200 is not as good as any of these, as you would expect, but for less than £350 it is unmatched as a MF scanner at that price.  In many cases, you would have to look real close to see a print was not from a more expensive scan, and I have done some A3+ prints to prove that to myself.  Also, it cannot dig out detail from very dense shadows on Velvia film, but many scanners fail here also.

Simon
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: sceptre12345 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 3:07 PM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Help Sought With 120 Scanning Decision


  Simon,
  Your photos are indeed sharp!
  Can you share with us your scanning workflow (regular holders or 
  fluid mounting, sharpening methods etc).
  Cheers,
  Andre

  --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Simon Lamb 
  <simon@s...> wrote:
  > If you are living with soft scans and not seeing the quality 
  difference
  > between a 2450 and 3200 then you must have a defective unit.  Here 
  are two
  > urls, the first a scan of a 6X6 Velvia transparency and the second 
  a scan of
  > a Portra 160VC negative, both done on an Epson 3200:
  > 
  > http://www.sclamb.com/scancomp/Church.jpg
  > 
  > http://www.sclamb.com/scancomp/Glen%20Portra.jpg
  > 
  > I test printed both of these to 20²X20² and they are sharp.
  > 
  > Simon
  >




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