Digital BW, The Print

I agree with all of that about thinner black and white negs working
much better. One client of mine always brings me pretty dense tri x
and t max medium format negs and they have always given me the most
trouble of anything I've worked with. 

John


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, hogarth@s... wrote:
>
> 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
>