Digital BW, The Print

"I used pyro on a couple of films a while back and while I was
impressed with the lack of grain in areas of continuous tone (sky
etc.) I found the grain quite exagerated in other areas compared to
some other developers"

I performed extensive testing comparing pyro to D76 several years ago. My 
basic procedure was to make duplicate negatives of various scenes, develop 
one in pyro (PMK) and one in D76 1-1 using lford HP5+ film, then making 
prints from both. I found no advantage  to the pyro prints in the sense that 
identical prints could be made from either set of negatives. I concluded 
that even if there happens to be some scene somewhere that could be 
photographed and better processed in pyro, for the vast majority of scenes 
pyro just wasn't worth screwing around with.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Ellis" <christian.ellis@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 3:15 AM
Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Scanning Pyro Negs?


I used pyro on a couple of films a while back and while I was
impressed with the lack of grain in areas of continuous tone (sky
etc.) I found the grain quite exagerated in other areas compared to
some other developers.

I used FP 4 and Pan F in 35mm and have a Minolta Scan Dual III.  The
Pan F was fairly grainless but was very high contrast so highlights
didn't hold a great deal of detail.  I didn't use an alkaline fixer
which I understand makes a difference to the stain.  Perhaps I should
have another go with an alkaline fix and reduce my dev time...  (I'm
afraid I've been chasing silver bullets for a while and never settle
long enough on any technique to really work it out properly.  When
will I learn?)

One idea I've recently had was simulating the effects of Pyro in
Photoshop.

Roughly speakly:

1)  Develop and scan your film as normal - I like to apply a slight
USM with no threshold to make the grain less mushy, but your scanner
might be better than this.
2)  Use grain removal software (eg Neat Image / Noise Ninja) to
produce a reduced grain version of the original.
3)  Create a photoshop file with two layers:  the full grain and the
smooth.  Probably put the grainy version on the bottom.
4)  Create a layer mask for the top layer using the technique
described for capture sharpening here:
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20357-2.html.  Blend the two
images by eg setting the opacity of the top layer to 50%.

I've inconclusively played around with this but wonder if anyone else
has some similar techniques up their sleeve.

Some further thoughts:

1)  You could do this in reverse using digital capture (another silver
bullet):  your initial capture becomes your grain-free layer and you
can create a layer with added noise as your grain layer.
2)  Speculatively:  you could use a pyro negative to emphasise this
effect if you could somehow separate the grain and the mask into
layers.  You would probably need a really good stain to stand any
chance of getting this to work.

Chris





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