Digital BW, The Print

Ah, thanks Nick. I eventually forced you to confess your meanest tricks ;-)
In the meantime, I experimented with an image I had, ehm, accidentally
brought here to office. You can see the results here:
 
What I had come up with using curves and levels:
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=1547270
<http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=1547270> 
 
What I got in half an hour of dodging and burning:
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=1547276
<http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=1547276> 
 
Film is FP4+ in 35mm, grain is definitely less evident but the main result
for me is that, although I couldn't duplicate what I originally got (not
that I tried that hard to), with this new method the result is *different*,
and that's even more important to me than the appearance (or lack thereof)
of grain.
 
Great thread.
 
Alessandro
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: nick90290 [mailto:NickBrandt@...]
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 19:00
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] levels and grain



--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Alessandro Pardi 
<alessandro.pardi@i...> wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>  
> I'm glad you're having a good time around here, this place is
really 
a gold
> mine...
> Two hours of work from scan to final image ain't bad (especially if 
spotting is included), but what I'd like to know is how you manage 
dodge/burn *evenly* large areas like skies. Maybe using a pen and 
tablet rather than a mouse helps? 


Ah, now there's a question. When I started photoshop I was using
dodge and burn at 5-8% at full size brush. Sometimes it worked just 
fine, other times, of course, unsurprisingly, I would get some pretty
crappy results. I've gotten much better at it, even in the last month, 
but now I have this other no doubt eccentric technique I sometimes use
for darkening the skies - which is lassoing areas with the maximum 
pixel size (250) feathering, following cloud lines, etc, and darkening 
the sections of sky down incremental stage by incremental stage.

The most useful thing I've learned recently, however, is so bloody 
obvious, I wish I'd figured this out earlier -

you know when you have a bit of sky that looks fine and smooth on the 
monitor, and then you do a print and only now do you see some really 
clunky tonal transitions? And you look at the monitor and the 
transition is so damned subtle you can barely see it there? 

Well, it certainly helps to wait until it's dark and switching all
the lights off so there's no ambient light spilling on the screen. But 
now, I apply a curves layer and darken the image massively just for 
purposes of being able to better see the clunky tonal transitions
that were almost impossible to see at the normal viewing. I then 
smooth out the clunky bits with some extremly gentle dodging and 
burning, and then, the transitions now smooth, I stick the dark curves 
layer in the trash, its job done. Duh, how bloody obvious was that. 
Took two years of working in photoshop to figure out that one. There's 
still a bunch of my photos I need to go back and do that to. Tra la 
la....

Nick

..



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