ColorNegs, Pyro, T-Max, Ilford...my brain is seizing!!!!!!

guys guys the more I read on this forum the more my brain freezes and I can't think for myself anymore!!!!!! :confused:

mission: to shoot my Sinar F2 5 x 4 camera and get beautiful bokeh on portraits, develop my own negs and then scan them on my Scanmate 5000 drum scanner (I annoyingly repeat this info in all my threads!!!) and thus "go for the grain to go against the grain" (i.e. shoot film again and not use the digital camera).....

So put the plan into motion I go.....

which film?
I've opted for T-Max 100 to revisit an old friend from medium format days...

Which developer?
...as I'm in Gibraltar I'm limited to buying powder developer such as ID-11 or Kodak D-76...so forget all this great PYRO stuff that makes better scans cos the liquid form is categorised as a dangerous liquid and would have to pay loads to get it over here from the UK......why not buy from Spain you ask, well good question...still to find a place that sells it all at a good price.....

how to develop?
...my instinct tells me to develop for a 'flat' curve, a N-1 I would say that holds details everywhere in the shadows and I then manipulate curves to give it kick as I desire if i desire....

so now scanning
here's what I've always done with 6 x 6 black n white film...I've scanned it as a positive (as if it were a transparency) as a greyscale 16-bit TIFF file and then done an 'Invert' in Photoshop.....

....but now I hear of this ColorNeg.....

I have the Scanmate 5000 hooked up to an old Powerbook G3 laptop and that hooked up via SCSI to the scanner.....it works off System 9 and ColorQuartet programme that comes with the scanner via an ADB dongle key....so no question of changing that up to a Mac OSX cos it just wont work(?).....

I've scanned colour negative film like Fuji Reala in the past and the results were rubbish so it was always Fuji provia III trannies or B+W film like T-Max or Ilford FP.....

does this ColorNeg solve it then? where can I get this ColorNeg as a trial for Mac OS system 9......cos if this scans colour negative film well that opens up new horisons!

I've not had major problems scanning color neg.

The secret to all this is learning how to color-correct andjust doing it over and over, developing your eye for corrections.

A good book to start with is the color section of any Barry Haynes Photoshop Artistry books, then moving on to Photoshop Color Correction by Michael Kieran.

All the information you could want on ColorNeg straight from the source.

If your scanner software won't delete the orange contrast mask correctly, this may work for you.

As to B&W, there generally isn't a mask to remove, so all that's left is setting the black and white points correctly and perhaps tuning the software's output curve a bit. Setting the black and white points correctly is generally critical on drum scanners, because most drum scanners use this information to set the hardware limits for the log-amp circuits. This causes the scanner to apply it's full digital range (10, 12, 14, or even 16 bits) across the limited density range you define by setting the black and white points. Whether you do this as a negative or a positive should have little meaning to the scanner because a density range is still a density range.

B&W on drum scanners generally isn't hard, but it's generally utterly non-intuitive so it takes a lot of trail-and-error testing to find out what works well and what doesn't. Experience rules when it comes to B&W from drum scanners!

The reason for this is that all scanners, from consumer flatbeds to drum scanners, are optimized for trannies. Some software also includes provisions for color negatives. Rarer still is software that includes provisions to properly handle the much smaller densities of B&W and the light scatter from metallic silver. This is why, for example, most Heidelberg operators love trannies and hate everything else -- NewColor / LinoColor isn't very negative friendly. I would expect ScanMate software to be more negative friendly since the machines were intended for smaller pre-press shops that needed more flexibility out of their scanners.