Digital BW, The Print

Nice Work Anthony, I have been using PortraB&W for some time now."35mm" My closest Minilab, Walgreen's has just installed a Fuji Frontier 330 system. I really like the results from this combo. Leroy from Milwaukee,Wi
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Anthony Atkielski 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2003 4:08 PM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Portra 400BW example


  I was very lukewarm about chromogenic B&W for quite a while, but I've
  discovered that Kodak Portra 400BW, at least, isn't bad at all (I haven't
  tested others enough to say).

  I went out one chilly evening and took some shots by the river with a tripod
  and a 6x6 MF camera, on Portra 400BW.  I recall using exposures of several
  seconds so that I could get some decent DOF.

  Here's one example that surprised me:

  http://www.mxsmanic.com/stairs.jpg

  The shot surprised me for several reasons:

  1. Portra 400BW is extremely sharp.

  2. The film also has amazingly fine grain, particularly for an ISO 400 film.

  3. It scans extremely well.

  4. This shot had a lot of stark contrast.  I was surprised and pleased to
  see that Portra 400BW had a great deal of headroom for manipulation, in both
  shadows and highlights.  I was able to pull rich detail from both
  (seemingly) blocked shadows and blown highlights, making them look very nice
  indeed, with no perceptible increase in noise or grain.  This allowed me to
  reduce the contrasts and come up with a very balanced image that shows
  detail in just about every corner.  Note the subtle shadows on the water
  surface, the details in the shadows on the wall on the right, and the detail
  in the highlight just opposite the lamp--much of that was extracted with
  Photoshop.  It was wonderful to be able to goof around with shadows and
  highlights and just see boatloads of extra detail waiting to be extracted.

  5. This film handles a much wider range of light intensities than I
  expected--i.e., it's a lot closer to B&W range than I at first thought it
  might be.  I didn't expect chromogenic B&W to hold contrast so well.

  6. Portra 400BW seems to work extremely well for night shots, just the
  opposite of what I had expected.

  This scan is extremely sharp.  For a full-size excerpt from the original
  scan, see

  http://www.mxsmanic.com/stairs1.jpg

  This was at 4000 dpi, and the grain is still hard to see in most of the
  image.  Fine details in the stone stand out.  I'm not sure where I had the
  focus set for this shot, as I set focus to maximum DOF rather than to target
  any specific detail.  Most of the area near the lamp is very sharp, though.

  Now, what I'd really like is to be able to get an image that looks like this
  on paper, with a dedicated B&W ink-jet printer.  How close could I come?
  Since this is MF an A3 enlargement would be easy to prepare.

  I have two other unusually successful examples of this film, one in MF and
  one in 35mm, but I accidentally overwrote the scans and I have to rescan one
  of them first.

  Portra 400BW, in summary, seems to be a kind of poor man's Tech Pan for me,
  as it has almost the same fine grain, and almost the same resolution, but it
  is much faster and does not require special B&W development.  It does have a
  kind of flat rendering like one sees in all truly panchromatic B&W films,
  but in these night shots, that doesn't seem to be an issue (sometimes it
  flattens day shots, though).



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