Digital BW, The Print

Hi Nick
 
thanks for your detailed answer. By the way, I wish I had had the chance to
see the original prints rather than the jpegs: when you make an exhibition
in Italy I'll be able to enjoy the real thing ;-)
 
Back to the issue, I agree that grain is a very limiting factor in digital
manipulations, much more than in the wet darkroom - that's why I now shoot
chromogenic B&W in 6x7, although it's not "real" B&W, has longevity problems
etc.  Yet I still have some old TMax400, FP4 and TriX in 35mm, and next time
I want to spend an evening clicking on the mouse I'll try your method.
 
Thanks again for sharing your pictures and your knowledge.
 
Alessandro

-----Original Message-----
From: nick90290 [mailto:NickBrandt@...]
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 17:25
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Avoiding graininess (was: Exhibition of my photos
using IJC in NY )


Hi Alessandro

Thanks for the compliments on the photos. Especially considering you 
saw a bunch of pokey little 3" inch images on the web. I'm very 
flattered.

In response to your answer, firstly let me say I feel very foolish
and dumb having been using Levels at all to create the majority of my 
contrast, since it was making many of my images way more grainy than 
they ever needed to be. 

The thing I found with levels is if you have a fairly grainy image to 
begin with, you increase the contrast of each invidual 'blob' of
grain to the next. Obviously working in Curves is better and helps to 
quite a degree. 

But what I now do - which is very painstaking, is try and create 
nearly all my contrast in the image, down to the smallest detail, 
through elaborate dodging and burning with the brush set to
mid-tones. 
That way, all the 'blobs' of grain are pretty similar to the original 
flat scan one started with. 

I was shocked at the difference it made when I started again from 
scratch on a number of photos. Grainy photos done the old way at 
11"x14", when re-done using my new time-consuming method, looked 
almost devoid of grain blown up to 20"x24". So when I did add more 
overall contrast to the new image in Curves , it was only a pretty 
small amount, that did little to make the image more grainy. 

I should add that I only have this problem with grainy images - the 
images shot on T-Max 100 (6x7 format) generally are grainless enough 
that they can handle some crude levels layers. 

Nick

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