Recent content by Adrian Bacon

Replenished DD and DD-X Don’t give the same results, the same as xtol and replenished xtol don’t give the same results.

If memory serves, approximately 2020. There’s a thread floating around documenting my switch to DD.

I've unfortunately (or fortunately, I guess it depends on your point of view) left replenished Xtol and went to replenished Ilford DD, and haven't looked back even once. The reason I left Xtol was due to the total mayhem that happened a few years back with dead developer (and the replacement...

If a lab uses a commercial film scanner (think fuji frontier, noritsu, etc), Phoenix 200 tends to give them trouble. Those that use a "home" scanner and software that gives a lot of latitude, Phoenix 200 tends to come out just fine.

If the customer orders prints, unless they specify analog RA-4 prints, they get a digital print of the digital scan. So few people are willing to pay for RA-4 prints (most aren't even willing to pay for prints of any kind at all) that it's not even on the list of available things, though my...

I suspect that a lot of people think that *it has* to be more complicated than that. There's no way it can be that simple. But... From my experience, it's just not as complicated as it seems to be. You need to have the correct per channel contrast, and the correct white balance for the...

Full spectrum is actually more important than the actual white balance of the light, though, in the interest of having as many discrete blue sample values as possible, a colder color temperature light is more preferable. If you want to avoid posterization or color banding artifacts, you want at...

I've always been confused by the whole effort of trying to match scans to an RA-4 print. They're completely different display mediums that could not be further apart from each other. That seems like an exercise in frustration. If it were that easy, somebody would have already done it. Not...

Let's go back to RA-4 paper. Its spectral response to light is what it is, so it has a set spectral response right? Color negative films all have different masks, which means the dyes also aren't exactly the same between emulsions. If they were, the masks would all be the same, but they very...

Ok. I don’t know how much of this is useful as a fair amount of it is relatively difficult/tedious to do with modern image editing tools, but I’ll dispense what I know. A fair amount of it might seem to be stupid simple common sense type stuff, but for some reason there abounds all sorts of...

Taking notes. Though, I’d like to clarify that my tool is a negative to positive conversion tool, not an image editor, so the tooling, knobs, and dials it has is for getting that conversion in a form that can then be pulled into an image editor of choice for further tweaking if desired and it’s...

In my experience owning and running a film lab, most people that want prints make 4x6 and 5x7 prints, and the scans are rarely more than 2048 pixels on the long end. I give the options to get 2048 pixels, 4096 pixels, and 8192 pixels on the long end of 35mm film with a 16 bit TIFF option for...

Awesome combination. I still have the Sigma 70mm ART Macro too. Man... that lens delivers the resolution. The only reason I migrated away from it to the RF 100 Macro was because I could get the rotating collar for the RF 100 which made it a lot faster to handle rotating the camera for 645 and...

I too am quite mystified by it. Much of the reasoning behind the x-trans sensor design made sense back in the day when resolution wasn’t that high. Trading color resolution for less need of an anti-aliasing filter on paper sounded good, but in reality made for a very challenging to handle raw...

It's all good. Making notes.