Digital BW, The Print

On 04/15/2003, Ellery (ellery@...) wrote: 

>Does running this in black & white slide mode help with the contrast gain and grain gain 
>that I see in some of the scan with this scanner - have notice it works better with Ifford neg 
>material.
>Had moth ball scanning a while back as was running into massive problems with contrast 
>gain and grain gain.  Hmmm do you fiddle much with the unsharp mask control in HP's s/w ?

ellery,

Yes -- using my eye as the measuring device, contrast gain is far better with B&W slide 
mode (vs B&W negative mode). The tonal transitions are left much more intact, smoother. 

The histogram tool in the HP scanner controls is very slick and helpful. Pull it up after the 
pre-scan and you see the image's tonal distribution positioned on the horizontal axis that 
represents the scanner's available tonal range. At each bottom corner of the histogram 
window there's a little triangular icon; clicking on one will put a translucent mask over 
the image and highlight any points-areas where high tones are being clipped (if any are); 
clicking on the other triangle one will show the same for the low tones. If anything is 
being clipped, you can use the tone-adjustment tool to shift the distribution to the right 
or left along the horizontal axis so that no image tones get clipped. I haven't yet had a 
B&W neg scanned in "B&W slide" mode that's overflowed the available tonal range -- 
but when I was using "B&W negative" mode I had a lot of overflows. My guess is the 
"slide' mode bypasses some later destructive processing (in the HP software) that gets 
involved with "neg" mode. 

Using the HP software per above, black and white points are outside the usable tonal 
range for the image. When it gets delivered to Photoshop, it will typically be very low 
contrast (like a raw image), and I use LEVELS to bring it up (and I keep the image as a 
negative until the black and white points that make it look right are about settled -- tell 
these by inverting (so the image is positive), checking it out, and then undoing the invert 
so the tones don't get yanked around by anything except the LEVELS changes ).  

Regarding sharpen/USM with the HP software, I have been setting the sharpness 
adjustment to +15;  tonight I realized that it might be better to let the UltraSharpen 
software (works great; it's like a Photoshop plug-in, ) that I've been using for a couple 
of months do whatever sharpening is needed, so reduced the sharpen in HP to +5. 
I develop my film in pyro to salvage all the high tones I can, so mostly I try to do as little 
sharpening as I can get away with. 

I like the Ilford films I use -- Delta 100 needs to be sharpened if I want grain to show. 
Once I had a roll of Delta 400 processed in XTOL, and the grain was really pronounced,
So I think the developer as well as the film really has an effect on the kind of image 
that comes out of the scan.

Hope some of this is helpful.

John                      
    



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