Taking a picture, part four: analog to digital
Thanks for your interest in my “Taking a Picture” series. Just as a note, I have continued improving my digital workflow and some of these notes are now out-of-date. Feel free to drop a line in the comments or contact me directly if you would like more information on my photographic workflow.
I think my situation is a pretty common one: I love film, especially black and white, but I don’t have the space or the time and energy to devote to a complete darkroom. Developing film is relatively easy and requires very little space, but printing means setting up an enlarger and trays of chemicals. And so, I use a hybrid process: I shoot and develop my own black and white film, but scan and print in digital.
It’s a pretty great situation, as far as I’m concerned. With my mid-range flatbed scanner (an Epson 4990) and my mid-range printer (Epson R2400), I can print excellent quality 12×12 black and white prints with no trouble at all. Larger sizes are beyond my capacity at the moment, but I’m thinking that a better scanner and printer are looming somewhere in the not-too-distant future.
I had been planning a long, drawn out technical discussion about scanning, but I got about half-way through writing it and gave up. For the few people who are using similar equipment and materials, a lot of the research has already been done. I think it’s probably wasteful for me to scan a negative ten different ways just to show that my approach is valid. I have done a lot of research, spent a significant amount of time experimenting, and I have come to the point where I feel like I am getting the most out of my somewhat limited equipment. I am happy to share my approach step-by-step; anyone who is curious can do their own experiments or further research to see if my methods prove out.
And so, here are my current thoughts on scanning. These methods relate specifically to scanning black and white medium format film on the Epson 4990, but much of the information probably extrapolates pretty well to similar flatbed scanners, and to a limited extent to film scanners as well. These are just my observations and I’m no expert—if anyone has any other opinions, please let me know in the comments.
- A flatbed scanner is always going to be a compromise. The practical optical resolution of the 4990 and the like is about 2000 dpi (despite the manufacturer’s claims of much higher). For me, that’s about enough to print a 2 ¼ MF negative at 12×12. I have tried to go larger, and things start to get ugly very quickly. At 12×12, my prints are at least as good as they were with an optical enlarger, and sometimes much better.
- The flatness of the film counts for a lot. The holders that came with my scanner were pretty flimsy. I upgraded to the medium format holder from betterscanning.com and noticed an improvement in sharpness right away.
- One way to extract even more quality from a flatbed scanner is by fluid mounting; that is, using scanning fluid and a sheet of acetate to hold the film extremely flat against a piece of glass to cut down on the diffusion of light from scratches, dust, and the grain structure of the film. My experiments on the 4990 using the BetterScanning.com variable height mounting station show a slight but noticeable improvement in the overall quality of scans when fluid mounting. For the most part, considering the amount of work and the ultimately limited optical resolution of the scanner, this does not make a big enough difference to be worth doing every time. Flatbed scanning does seem to exaggerate the grain of film compared to wet printing, though, so if that’s a problem that’s showing up in the final print, fluid mounting might be worth a try.
- Software is important, too. The 4990 comes with a basic Epson scanning package as well as Silverfast. I didn’t care for either. I use VueScan Pro to scan to RAW TIFF files at 2400 DPI with 4x multi-sampling. I scan straight to 16-bit grayscale using only the green channel, as that’s the sharpest and contains the least amount of noise for my scanner. This is probably worth checking for yourself, it may be that every scanner is different in this regard.
- I open the TIFF file in Photoshop without assigning a color space, and then use ColorNeg to invert the image. I first learned about this trick on Colin Jago’s Photostream blog, and I’ve found the process to be invaluable for both black and white and color film scanning. The ColorNeg conversion process results in a more pleasing tonality and “film like” image, especially on tricky negatives, than anything else I’ve tried.
- Once the image is inverted, I assign a color space (I use QTR Gray Lab, since I will eventually be printing to the R2400 with QuadTone Rip), and do some basic curves to create what I consider to be the “work print.” This is the starting point for working with the image in Photoshop to create what will ultimately become a black and white print.
Here’s an example of a negative that has been scanned and inverted using ColorNeg:
Remember, this is just a basic work print. I spend about 30 seconds in curves with this, just to get a point of reference to begin working on the image. For the record, this is Ilford HP5+ film exposed at EI 320, developed for 11.5 minutes in Xtol 1:1 at 68 degrees. This is one of those rare images that won’t actually require too much post-processing in Photoshop to get to the point where I’m ready to print it. Next week, I’ll focus on processing and ultimately printing this photograph.
This series of blog posts follows a single image from it’s very conception all the way through to the final print. When I’m done, I’m going to give the print to someone who has commented on one of the posts along the way.
Click here to read other posts in this series.
April 16, 2008