Digital BW, The Print

djon43 wrote:

>
> I don't think scanners want "thin" negs

Ah, but they do. I'm a drum scanner operator. I've run a long series of 
tests with my own work using 5x4 Tri-X. Optimum for my scanner turns out 
to be what you might call an N-1.5 negative.

There are a number of reasons for this. Not least is the collimated 
light and the resulting Callier effect. If you can get the amount of 
silver down, you decrease light scatter. That, by itself, argues for 
less density (thinner negs).

> , and it's certainly not right
> to say enlargers prefered dense negs. The use of "dense" and "thin"
> suggests earlier negs were never optimal for the darkroom .

They weren't really. That was why guys like Adams worked so hard on 
tools like the Zone System - to bring negatives closer to optimal for 
darkroom printing with the fixed paper grades of the day.

>
> Exposing/processing B&W film with basic N/N+/N- controls, one can
> almost always print "properly" on one standard grade of one's standard
> paper, and of course those negs scan well.

They do in deed scan well. If they were a bit thinner, they would scan 
even better however.

>
> For me, darkroom practice didn't imply accident or exploration.
> Scanning facilitates lots of new interpretations of images, but
> because of early exposure to basics of Zone System (I never got deep
> with it) my negs have almost always enlarged the way I intended, had
> the tonal scale I needed, were rarely challenges in the darkroom.
>
> John Kelly

You should have no difficulty scanning these negs.

I've always said that if you are going to use the negs for both darkroom 
and scanning, optimize for the darkroom only. But if you are only going 
to scan (that would be me) optimize for scanning which, for me and my 
drum scanner, turns out to be a bit thinner than for darkroom work.
--
Bruce Watson