BTZS and Digital Darkroom

Is anyone using BTZS and printing digitally? I would like to hear about your experiences.

This may be of some limited help. It depends somewhat on how you are scanning. A good drum scan can pull detail out of pretty dense highlights and deep shadows. With a prosumer flatbed you have to be more careful. Sorry I don't use BTZS but I do you the zone system (197. Generally a negative made for silver printing will scan well. But for making a negative specifically designed for scanning purposes I aim for a neg that has slightly less contrast than for silver printing, but will still print on silver if I want to. Basically my exposure is the same (ZIII placement of important detail) but with about 5-10% less development. This ensures that I can control highlight detail. And if I want to do a traditional silver print with the same negative I can use a number 3 paper.

I scan the negatives with a ballpark tone curve but largely unclipped in the highlights. The tone curve at this stage saves me from accentuating the noise in the transition areas between tones that get multiplied by applying the same curve in Photoshop. Unclipping the highlights in the scan (except for completely unnecessary information) ensures that I have all the highlight detail intact for more accurate clipping later in the PS workflow.

p01forme3 said:

Is anyone using BTZS and printing digitally? I would like to hear about your experiences.

Click to expand...

To put a number on it, if you develop your film with a density range of 1.1 to 1.4 you will have no problems scanning your film on modern scanners. This DR is about what one would use for printing silver gelatin fairly easily.

Don Bryant

Thanks this has been most helpful.

Two things.

First, I believe that a consistent exposure and development system such as BTZS is useful, even if your intention is to later scan and print digitally. If all of your negatives are uniform in density and contrast you will save a lot of time in adjusting the curves in the pre-scan.

Second, I know that most of the wisdom out there is that if you plan to scan your negatives they should be developed to a lower DR than normal. I develop to a very high DR, in case I might want to print with an alternative process, but have no problem at all scanning negatives with a DR of 1.7-1.8. I use a pyro staining developer and this may or may not have something with the ease of scan.

Sandy

Sandy,

FWIW I find highlight compression in scanning produces less noise than highlight expansion (so there is some advantage to your method), but I get better high value separation with some slight expansion hence why I slightly under-develop and apply a slight S curve in the scan.

In general though I agree:

First, I believe that a consistent exposure and development system such as BTZS is useful, even if your intention is to later scan and print digitally.

Click to expand...

The alternative produces less than optimum results no matter what your output is.

I do not use the BTZS, but do use the zone system. I aim to have my highlights on ZIX and ZX, but my shadows are on Zone IV! This is so that what I want to print is in the linear portion of the curve, and that there is good contrast in the shadows. At times I even let highlights go to ZXI when I see it is important not to get compression of tonalities when giving minus development. I view local contrast as very important, and can deal with the denser negative when printing. I do not see an issue with scanning on my 4990, but the drum scans of course are superior .

Consistency in methodology is important as the others have said.....and so is knowing what to acheive in the final print (previsualization).

Mike

Michael,

Explain this further please:

This is so that what I want to print is in the linear portion of the curve

Click to expand...