Digital BW, The Print

I have scanned lots of medium format Ilford Pan F+ on my Nikon Coolscan
9000 scanner. About 80% of portfolio images on my website are from Pan
F+, including Night photographs of Dublin
<http://www.philpankov.com/-/philpankov/gallery.asp?cat=4992>   series.
Despite people saying that Pan F is very contrasty film and not suitable
for night photography, etc, I found that you can regulate it's
contrast a lot with your development. Pan F+ developed in Pyro is the
most wonderful black and white combo currently available, in my opinion.
Pyro masks the little grain that Pan F has and I have 30x40 inch Lambda
prints (from 6x9 negs scanned with Nikon) where you cannot see any
grain, while all details are beautifully resolved. Don't give up on
Pan F! :-)



About your problem with noisy shadows – can you specify multipass
scanning with your Minolta scanner? Multipass scanning on Nikon helps
somewhat with noise, but in my tests difference between 1 x pass and 16
x pass is not that great – so, I scan at 8 x pass. Not sure about
Minolta.



P.S. This is my first post on this group – I have been reading for a
while. I still print about 90% of my prints in the darkroom myself (rest
10% in the lab), but plan to invest in the printer… Great group
guys!



P.P.S. By the way, does anyone want to exchange the links between black
and white photography websites? Email me at info@...
<mailto:info@philpankov.com>



Regards,



Philip Pankov

Black & White Photography of Ireland <http://www.philpankov.com/>




--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, David Keenan
<ausdlk@...> wrote:
>
> I am working with 30 some-odd 5400 dpi scans of Ilford Pan F film.
>
> I'd expect the resulting images to be virtually grainless.This is
evident onscreen and in a print.
>
> But in some images shadow areas are particularly grainy. I dunno maybe
it's that nasty grain aliasing affect that I read about some scanning
doing. The grain manifests itself in a pattern of speckly white dots.
>
> I really don't want to rescan the image but I can if necessary return
to the original scanned image file. What I hope to learn via this post
is if there are any PS techniques that can be used to hide this in
selected areas.
>
> I have tried selective noise reduction using the Photoshop filter and
Noise Ninja without limited success.
>
> Dave.
>




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