Digital BW, The Print

On 23/12/2007 nsams2002 wrote:
> Or is the scanning of negatives bound to result in a vastly inferior
> image?

Absolutely not.  It's slow and painful and takes a lot of post production, 
but I have managed to scan and print many negatives that were absolute 
swines via enlarger, or simply impossible to print satisfactorily - and I 
was a good bromide printer.

4000ppi is enough (given decent optics) to get 95%+ image info off the 
film, and although there are further small gains to 8,000ppi (and even 
12,000ppi), they really are small.

However it really does take a lot of work to do well. I can easily spend 
20min-2hrs on a single frame.

I always scan to 16bit via Vuescan (www.hamrick.com), then adjust curves 
and black and white point, spotting etc. Often I take images apart, create 
different versions with different 'exposure' and curves from the 16 bit 
scan, then comp them together again. I have been able to get better 
results from scanning 35mm than I was ever able to in the darkroom, using 
a Polaroid 4000. Which is, BTW, dog slow, and has no dust repair tech like 
Digital ICE (but that doesn't work on silver image films anyhow).

There are grain aliasing issues with with some film types and scanners. 
Nikons tend to be worse than other makes due to their use of 
semi-collimated LED lightsources. Diffuse lightsource filmscanners such as 
the Polaroid/Microtek and Minolta models are less picky. With my Polaroid 
4000 the only times I have seen it have been with some TMZ (ISO1600) and 
overexposed Fuji 200 colour neg. Older 2700ppi models were far more prone 
to grain aliasing, eg the LS2000 was fond of introducing 'grit' into 
midtones. A lot of people believed it was grain itself, it was in fact an 
arifact of grain sizes and distribution producing an irregular moire 
effect due to the spatial sampling frequency of the scanner.

I was never much of a grain fan and tended to shoot and process for 
fine-ish grain. The chromagenic B&W films, XP1/XP2 and Tmax CN are superb 
and scan beautifully, but ordinary silver emulsions do too unless you like 
pushed film and contrasty development when highlight densities can become 
a problem.

There are also tools like Neat Image (which I use) and Noise Ninja which 
can mitigate grain, although things go a bit plastic if overdone. Of 
course you have access to the full digital toolkit including sharpening 
for output, all of which is much more powerful than wet darkroom 
techniques. 4000ppi scans exceed in most respects what I can get from an 
EOS 1Dmk2n and it's quite possible to produce prints from images shot on 
ISO400 B&W (usually TMY) that look more like darkroom prints from ISO50.

It seems clear your shop did sloppy scans and chopped the black point, 
losing shadow detail in the process. That's just sloppy, recent scanners 
can scrape nearly every bit of shadow detail off the film and keep it 
without introducing unwanted CCD noise. Unfortunately the Polaroid and 
Minoltas are now only available s/h - the Minolta 5400 sells for more now 
than it did new.

-- 
Regards

Tony Sleep
http://tonysleep.co.uk