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Black and White Film

Good Morning Scott,

I haven't tried HPI, I have been taking them to the pro shop on Richmond closer to the loop. I won't mention thier name but you know who they are. The slides and negatives come back dirty with all kinds of scratches and dust spots on them.

My father in law used to work at HPI years ago before he passed away. I need to get a price list from them. Part of the problem of using a shop like HPI is the cost of developing all the film it takes to develope my technique again. Let's face it, that is what it is all about...shooting enough rolls of film to learn and continue to extend to the boundries of the experience.
 
Hi Warren,

Hmmm. Maybe you speak of our "last 'real' camera store". Their commercial always cracks me up, its so cheesy. I got the 90mm for my G1 there for close to $200 after haggling a little. It was in fine shape and it even had a thin Contax 1A filter on it. Pretty good price for it. They probably have one of the best selections of film in town too. I guess maybe developing isn't their specialty and is geared toward the consumer market.

HPI charges about $4 for C-41, $8 for E-6 processing. Eckerds charges $2 for processing C-41 but I just never know what I'm going to get. Its worth the extra two bucks. Eight is pricey for slides but they do it the same do day if you drop it off early (call they'll tell you their run times). One thing, you have to tell them exactly what you want or you get your film back on big rolls, uncut. Great if you have a film scanner, not good if you have a flatbed like me. Tell them if you wanted it mounted(free), cut & sleeved, etc. I've developed 20 or so rolls there now at least and it always had that professional touch, dust free, scratch free, no kinks in the negative strips.

--
Scott
 
Mike, thanks for mentioning the specific advantages of shooting on B&W film. Those advantages, however, dynamic range and resolution, would only be fully enjoyed if printing in the wet darkroom. The type of scanner we are discussing in this thread cannot reproduce ten stops of contrast. Your excellent ex&les of the Minolta and Epson scans show clearly the problem of scanning B&W film in a normal 35mm scanner. My Nikon B&W scans look similar to your Minolts scans. I had to use NeatImage software to reduce the grain in the scanned files. Without Neatimage, the scans were unusable.

Guy, your point is well taken, but I make a living from taking photographs and producing prints for my clients. My hourly rate of pay is directly proportional to how fast I can complete each job and start the next job. For me to experiment with B&W film, or as implied, return to the wet darkroom, is to really swim against the tide in professional photography. The unstoppable trend to all-digital capture and processing in professional photography, even for B&W output, is driven by the efficiency of the digital workflow, and in particular, the complete elimination of the film processing step of the workflow. Here in Hong Kong, I get professional E6 processing for US$2.50 per roll, with a two hour turnaround time. B&W films are returned the next day, or two days later if I ask for contact prints. So my competitor shooting digital has made his prints (without any "cleaning up" required) before I even got my B&W films back from the lab. Then I spent two days "cleaning up" the scanned B&W frames.

So all-in-all, the evidence indicates that B&W film is a square peg in the round hole of film scanning. B&W film has admirable and desirable merits for the wet darkroom route. But I still see no good reason to use it in the film scanning and digital darkroom workflow.

Perhaps our differing viewpoints come from the fact that we might have a different purpose when we take photographs. A working professional photographer is running a business, and has to consider the business merits as well as the technical and artistic merits of each choice made in film or technology or technique. But a fine art photographer or amateur photographer would use a very different equation when making those choices.

To me, from a business point of view, B&W film makes no sense in the digital darkroom, because it costs a lot of extra time, and gives no tangible benefit at the output end of the digital darkroom.

Best,

Craig
 
Craig,

> Mike, thanks for mentioning the specific
> advantages of shooting on B&W film. Those
> advantages, however, dynamic range and
> resolution, would only be fully enjoyed if
> printing in the wet darkroom.

That is simply not true. You said 10 stops of contrast, that requires a bit depth of 10 bits for a scanner, and most any scanner these days is capable of that with little issue. If you aren't getting 10 stops, then the setpoints aren't getting set correctly, and/or the tonal curves aren't being adjusted correctly.

As far as resolution goes, a print from a 4k SPI scan can easily match what you can get from a wet print.

I have found that in fact, the dynamic range I can get from scanning film, and then printing digitally using the Piezo system from www.inkjetmall.com gives me better tonality and more dynamic range than I was able to get in the darkroom (and I'm no slouch in the darkroom).

> Then I spent two days "cleaning up" the
> scanned B&W frames.

That very well may be your experience, but it is not mine. Someone is doing something wrong if you have to "clean up" the scanned B&W frames.

> To me, from a business point of view, B&W film
> makes no sense in the digital darkroom, because
> it costs a lot of extra time, and gives no
> tangible benefit at the output end of the
> digital darkroom.

Again, that may very well be true for you, but it is not true for many thousands of people who shoot B&W film, scan it, and print it digitally, my self included. The prints are superior and reproducibility is much easier. All I can suggest is that if you aren't getting decent results with scanning film and digitally printing you are doing something wrong. Either you aren't scanning correctly, or you aren't printing right. You can't just print them using any old inkjet printer, by just printing using the black only ink and expect to get decent results. You MUST use a quadtone ink system, and either use something like Piezo, or a curve drives system with MIS quadtone inks to get decent results. This is an art, as is photography, and it requires some skill and patience to do right.

Fact is, scanning B&W film, and printing digitally can result in better prints than chemical prints, and if you doubt this, I'd suggest you seek someone knowledgeable in this area, and see their prints. You can also join one of the B&W digital lists (one I mentioned elsewhere in this thread), and they do print exchanges quite frequently (you have to submit a print to participate in the exchange), but you get an idea of what other people are capable of, which, if you want to see where you stand, and want to improve your techniques, can be very beneficial.

Regards,

Austin
 
Austin, you seem to be missing my point. I am capable of producing good B&W prints. I and my clients are happy with the B&W prints I produce. My point is simply that it takes so much longer in the digital darkroom with traditional B&W films when compared to films that have cleaner emulsions and can have Digital ICE applied during the scanning step.

Further, A/D bit depth is not the same as dynamic range. A desktop scanner with a 10 bit A/D cannot necessarily reproduce well a full 10 stops of dynamic range of light in an original scene. I don't want to go into a detailed debate about that here, because it's off topic.

The topic as originally asked by Warren is "what B&W films are good for scanning?" Your answer is Kodak Tri-X. Someone else mentioned Kodak Portra. My answer is "not Agfa APX or Iford FP4 Plus". If I have the time, I might give the Tri-X and Portra a trial. Let's leave it at that.

Best,

Craig
 
Hi Craig,

> Austin, you seem to be missing my point.

Not at all.

> My point is simply that it takes so much longer
> in the digital darkroom with traditional B&W
> films when compared to films that have cleaner
> emulsions and can have Digital ICE applied
> during the scanning step.

If it is taking you longer doing digital, then, as I said, something is not right. There should be no need for "Digital ICE"...if you need it, then, again, something else is not right. It's a band-aid, if you are talking about newly developed film that is. It has it's use for degraded film.

> Further, A/D bit depth is not the same as
> dynamic range.

I did not say anything about the A/D bit depth, but the A/D bit depth IS the dynamic range of the A/D, not of the scanner. I said that 10 stops requires 10 bits, and the way scanners are designed, and the way dynamic range works, that is correct. Any modern scanner hardware can give you 10+ clean bits.

The number of bits you get from the scanner hardware is, typically, remapped into 8 bits for printing, since you really can't use more than 8 bits anyway because the human visual system is only capable of discerning between 100 and 200 shades of gray in any given lighting situation (and 8 bits gives you 256 shades). There is possible merit, though, to the print driver providing more than 256 though, even though you can't distinguish them, as it allows for smother transitions between discernable tones. This is a whole discussion topic in and of it self (as are most aspects of this discussion).

> A desktop scanner with a 10 bit A/D...

No modern desktop scanner only has a 10 bit A/D. Only quite old scanners will. Modern scanners, typically, have 12 or 14 bit A/Ds, and a few new ones have 16. But, the number of bits is only as good as the imaging sensor, and the AFE (Analog Front End), and typically, the limiting factor is the sensor, which almost all are able to provide 12+ clean bits in modern scanners.

> If I have the time, I might give the Tri-X and
> Portra a trial. Let's leave it at that.

And I am also suggesting that you need to pay attention to development as well. Also, if you get the setpoints and tonal curves correct in the scanner driver/application you won't have to do any fiddling in PS, you should simply resize (without res&ling) and print, depending on what your printing system is. In order to get quality B&W prints, you really need to use quadtone inks, and again, pay close attention to the printing methodology. It does require some skill to get an outstanding digital B&W print, as it does to get a chemical B&W print...but, it should be faster, and certainly is far more repeatable, than chemical prints.

Regards,

Austin
 
Craig,

Watch out, you're confusing the dynamic range of the film with the dynamic range of the scanner. Just because the film can handle more than 10 stops of contrast does NOT mean that these values will be represented by a similarly broad range of densities on the film. Far from it; the Dmax of most B&W films is in the low threes. This is well within the range of most scanners. As for resolution, the Minolta 5400 is capable of extracting some crackingly sharp scans from good quality B&W film, but always with a hard and slightly "digital" grainy look -- I can't get a print that has the feel of a wet print. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any 35mm film scanner that has a truly diffuse light source (the LED-based Nikon's may actually come closest to that in fact) so if it's true that you can't get what you want from a 35mm scanner then that's more to do with what's available on the market rather than any inherent technical limitations. I've got high hopes for the Nikon 9000ED when it eventually ships, but that's a whole jump upwards in price and occupies almost the same amount of space as a darkroom ;o)

BTW, just delve a little deeper into the business of how different levels from the scene are represented on film, and how this affects the scanner's ability to discern them, take a look at this article:

http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/technology/sensitometry/

(Caveat: this comes from Timo Autiokari's AIM website, and Timo has been ridiculed in some circles for his views on the effects of image gamma. However, there's nothing contenious on the above page, and I have checked his calcs thoroughly -- it's all good accurate information to the best of my knowledge)

Look at the curves for Kodak Supra. They bear a reasonably close resemblance to the characteristics of B&W neg film, except there are three curves rather than one. Looking at the mid-tone region for the blue curve, we are dealing with densities on the film of around 1.5D. Shouldn't provide too much of a challenge for a scanner, right? However, look where we are on the transmittance scale: 10^-1.5=0.032. Now, see where that lies on the plot of LINEAR tranmittance against exposure. It's right down on the very flat part of the curve, meaning that for small changes in values in the original scene we will have VERY small changes in the values read by the (linear) CCD in the scanner. Once these values have been inverted and curved to produce an image for viewing or printing (mimicking the effect of applying the characteristics of the printing paper's log response in the traditional process) these values get scaled up and spread apart, so any errors in the numbers retrieved from the CCD will be magnified. Add in a hard light source, which puts very sharp boundaries on the grain structure and hence increases any tendency towards grain aliasing (the effect whereby individual pixel values get excessively influenced depending up whether a grain clump falls wholly or partly inside or outside a given sensor site's catchment area), and it's easy to see why most scans of B&W film look as they do.

If you followed that, it should now be clear why &le bit depth and good noise control are key requirements when you are trying to scan neg film. It's a much more demanding activity than scanning chromes, where your only concern is to have enough "reach" to pull out any detail in the dark areas. My own experience of scanning some very dark Kodachrome originals has reassured me that we are pretty much there with the latest generation of scanners such as the 5400.

-= mike =-
 
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