Contact Printing and Scanning - Same Negative

Hi There,

I'm just getting back into shooting film. Hopefully my 5x7 camera will be online soon, I got it on ebay and it needed some work.

I'm interested in 2 things: contact printing and scanning for digital printing. For scanning, do you generally expose a negative the same as you would for conventional dark room printing? If I was planning on scanning initially, but had hopes to do contact printing in the future, would I expose/process the negatives differently?

Thanks!
Paul

In my experience I have exposed my negatives with the proper exposure needed wether the end result be scanning or darkroom printing and it seems to work.

There are ideal ways to expose and develop for each and every different process, and even for each different enlarging paper. If you will be doing more than one thing with the same negative, there will always have to be a compromise of some sort. Thus, if you want to perform a few different printing processes using the same piece of film, it is a matter of finding the "ideal compromise" that will work for you. You can't ever go too wrong with aiming for a negative that will print well on silver gelatin paper. Once you have that, there are a lot of things you can do well with it. I'd ask at Hybrid Photo dot org for more details.

I would also expose and develop for silver printing. Scanning has a lot of flexibility, so you should aim to make negatives suitable for their original purpose...printing.

The main issue with scanning b&w is exaggeration of the grain. Even if you use LF and a fine-grained film, you will still see more grain than you would see via optical printing. For this reason I prefer a pyro developer (wd2d+ in my case) for b&w negs that may be scanned. Also, in my opinion, the deltas and tmaxes are more suitable for scanning than the 'traditional' films. I strongly prefer the traditionals for optical prints, though.

For MF negs, chromogenics (xp2) scan extremely well, and you can use ICE.

If you haven't already, visit hybridphoto, you will get much more scanning info there than here.

Just experiment! Take what you read as something you need to verify with your own hands. There are some well-debated issues associated with scanning, pyro versus non pyro developers, tabular/epitaxial vs. traditional grain, etc.

"The main issue with scanning b&w is exaggeration of the grain"

Keith is right, but I'd say it a little differently.

Just as an Printing System (enlarger, lens, etc., etc.) has a limit to biggest print it can make,
so does a scanner. The enlarger renders the unseeable as mush, a scanner as mushy dots.
Whether it is the Rayleigh Criterion or the Nyquist Rate, all it means is that there is a point when
we are just making the image bigger, but not digging any more information from the negative.

The great news is that scanning 5x7 negs on a consumer scanner can easily make 20x 30 enlargements.

A good neg for contact printing is a good neg for scanning, and if you visit Hybridphoto you can find all kinds of good answers.

Sully75 said:

If I was planning on scanning initially, but had hopes to do contact printing in the future, would I expose/process the negatives differently?l

Click to expand...

The rule of thumb is: If you are *ever* going to print in the darkroom, optimize your film for the darkroom; it will scan just fine. Only optimize for scanning if you are certain that you will *never* print in the darkroom.

Well, hold on now, though! You can walk and chew gum at the same time; you can kill two birds with one stone. There's no reason to commit to one developer for contacts that causes you to get less optimal scans!

Pyro development may be the way to go. Something like wd2d+ will allow you to do traditional silver gelatin, alt prints, and get less grainy scans... and protect highlights somewhat.

Of course, I am not saying that id11/d76 etc dev'ed negs won't scan, they will... but from experience I can say that the pyro negs are in a different category altogether because of the way scan-grain is mitigated... and pyro negs produce excellent silver prints as well.

Recently I posted a wd2d+ developed neopan 400 neg scan. Out to enlargements of, I dunno 4-5x or so, there is no scan grain to be seen. And of course in the optical prints there is no grain whatsoever. (that said, I know that some will miss it!)