Digital BW, The Print

steveabrink wrote:
> I'm shooting a Mamiya 7ii w/ 6x7cm film and scan w/ a Microtek 120 MF 
> scanner w/ Silverfast. The problem is when I scan at 4000 ppi optical 
> at 16 bit my resulting files are 500+ MB, and that is w/o adjustment 
> layers in the post processing stage which can be 1 gb+!  The quality 
> BTW is usually better than my 5D Canon... I've tested downsampling to 
> 3200 and even 2400 ppi and I really can't see a difference which brings 
> it down nearly half the file size.  I'm not even sure I can see a 
> differnce when downsampling from 16 bit to 8 bit if I don't do much 
> post processing. I'm just wondering what other folks do to keep there 
> files sizes reasonable and still attain the highest quality...? 
>
> Thanks in advance!
> SteveB   
>   

I routinely scan my 5x4 B&W negatives to about 11x enlargement so I can 
have some small amount of room to clean up the rebates and perhaps 
correct for some in-camera rotation, etc. and still make a 125x100 cm 
print at 120ppcm. A 16 bit grayscale scan comes out to 350 MB or so. 
This is a size that Photoshop easily handles on my six year old (!) PC 
running win2k with 3GB of memory.

Scan files from color negatives are routinely 3x that size, and are 
considerably worse to deal with in Photoshop. So I feel your pain.

But it's the price of quality. The reason I'm using LF is to get the 
image quality I want. I've run the experiments making scans at different 
scanner resolutions, making prints from those scans and comparing the 
prints, and found that the scans described above are necessary for me to 
make prints of the quality I want. That they are difficult to deal with 
in Photoshop is just part of the price I have to pay to make a print of 
the quality I want to make.
--
Bruce Watson