Case in point - my niece regularly feeds me a roll of poorly (variably) exposed Fomapan 400. She enjoys (for whatever reason) shooting film from time to time, but she does not have a solid background in photography, her capabilities in terms of exposure are quite basic and her expertise and interest in the technical sides of photography are superficial at best. So whenever I've processed a roll of her film, I find myself looking at maybe 6-12 frames that are properly exposed, with the rest being generally frighteningly thin in the shadows.
At at that point, I could go back to her, give her my sternest look, set her film on fire with a zippo and tell her she should damn wel do a better job because there's no polishing to these turds. Alternatively, I can gently explain that maybe she could set her camera to 200 instead of 400 for this film and see if she can find the time between changing diapers, getting the kid back from daycare and consulting with a neverending string of diabetes patients to have a look at one or two YouTube videos on exposure (but who am I kidding given her valid priorities). And I'll Wetransfer her images which I've diligently scanned, applied a totally dramatic, outrageous and insane contrast adjustment so that at least my niece will recognize her toddler without having to wonder if it's maybe the neighbor's kid, and guess what - she's happy. Because THAT's what reality often looks like. Whether you like it or not, that's what happens, and we're going to talk about that on a forum as well from time to time.
I can confirm that this was my intent.
Exactly. My holiday photo is my holiday photo. I can't take it again. If I screwed up the development or exposure, I still care about how much I can salvage.
Kodak claims Ektar and Tmax films are better for scanning. Anyone know why?
Ah, but then you'll have no issues at all. Yes, I agree with everyone else saying that scanning those screwed up negatives will in fact return an image, a document, and will 'salvage' your holiday snaps.
I mean, if you wanted, and the purpose was restoration of poorly exposed or processed irreplaceable analogue content, you could skip LR & curves altogether and feed those negative scans to Midjourney or Dall-E or Leonardo and get a great usable, actually more than usable, document.
Matt said that certain types of exposure or development mistakes might be easier to manage in the darkroom and others digitally. There is nothing wrong with me wanting to understand why that would be the case. You telling me to use an AI to generate images instead of learning how to handle unintentionally poor negatives can reasonably be interpreted as... uhmm... showing me the door.
She has a Canon EOS 300 with a perfectly fine light meter; I've verified it works as it should. It's just that she lacks the experience to consistently nail exposures under the circumstances she uses the camera in, which range from snapshots while skiing in sunny-16 conditions and snow everywhere to Christmas dinner around the table in EV-sub-zero conditions. Mind you, between the first and the most recent roll there's a world of difference already; she's learning! But she can't afford (esp. time-wise) to practice a whole lot, so I expect there will be many more frames where a scanner and a dramatic twitch of the curves will save aunt E. from the blackness of zone I.Can you gift her a camera with a light meter?
Matt said that certain types of exposure or development mistakes might be easier to manage in the darkroom and others digitally. There is nothing wrong with me wanting to understand why that would be the case.
I’m hoping experienced users to generously share some insights on the exposure latitude of modern films for learning. How much can we over- or underexpose and still without big difference after standard development and scanning? Not only exposure error, but the presence of both highlights and shadow details is also an related issue.
Can you gift her a camera with a light meter?
My wife's camera is too automated. It reads DX codes. Foma doesn't have DX codes, and if it had one it'd say 400 instead of 200. I went on Amazon and got a set of DX code stickers that read ISO 250 and gave them to her to sick on Foma 400 canisters.
Hi, I've posted about some pro portrait/wedding films over the years; here's one such...
What's the exposure latitude of Color Neg film?
Somehow, I don't think Drew photographs weddings. The initial answer to the question posed in the title is a question - "For which photographic usage?" If you are controlling the light, and aiming for extremely accurate and/or dependable colour rendition, Drew is completely right. If you are...www.photrio.com
That's a correct guess. In 25 years of experience in scanning my negatives, I've never been able to 'rescue' via scanning and/or post-processing a very thin negative. A poor negative always, without exception, yields a poor scan.
I'll go even further: after a bit of experience, it even becomes possible to identify from the scan, whether the negative was too thin or not. The negative is the final word, of course, but the scan often offers important hints. If you do this for years you can pick up, from a scan, whether photo-shopped or not, whether intensely 'curved' or not, if the negative wasn't ideal for scanning.
I've never, without fail, seen a perfect scan from a very thin (or very thick) negative, even if the person producing it was a Photoshop wizard. In fact, Photoshop wizardry doesn't exist - it's an excuse wet printers often use to justify their poor understanding of the hybrid process. You can't polish a turd. Of course, everything is now changing with AI-produced or doctored images.
But to go back to your question above, in my own experience, and my own workflow, the best scans are obtained for a negative exposed and developed for a target gamma in the interval .55-.6. This is basically a target gamma in the region of what was considered 'standard' in the days of wet printing with a condenser enlarger head.
Sounds honestly not so surprising to me, as the engineers who designed film scanners had to start somewhere and my unsupported assumption is that they would have started designing the device to perform well in a reasonable distribution of densities centred at gammas of negatives exposed and developed according the accepted standard at the time.
She has a Canon EOS 300 with a perfectly fine light meter; I've verified it works as it should. It's just that she lacks the experience to consistently nail exposures under the circumstances she uses the camera in, which range from snapshots while skiing in sunny-16 conditions and snow everywhere to Christmas dinner around the table in EV-sub-zero conditions.
I would stress that I really was talking about negatives at the margins.
I may as well repost this off-shared image - from a negative that upon first glance looks very, very thin.
View attachment 400382
That happens to be a scan from the negative. It also prints well in the darkroom.
I don't have a great example of a very dense negative to compare it with, but this one goes at least part of the way:
That happens to be scanned from a print (If I remember correctly).
I post these two as examples merely to make it clear that both very thin and very thick negatives can be handled well both ways. It is only when I get right out on the edges of usability that I encounter a bit of preference.
I think I'm about to reveal just how little I know about film, but I was expecting that once I've nailed down the right ISO for the film + developer + paper combo, I could just set that ISO and trust the camera to do the right thing... I understand why I should overexpose a high-contrast scene so there's detail in the shadows, but I don't understand why I'd have to adjust anything for Christmas dinner vs skiing in sunny-16 conditions. Aside from contrast, why can't I just trust the light meter to take care of it?
The outliers become more obvious as you get used to things. Not surprisingly, the scenes that require that the meter reading be varied from are the ones that are far from "average". The much brighter than middle tone ski slopes are a great example - you probably want the negative to give you white snow in your result, not medium grey snow, so if it is mostly white in what you see, you need to change the exposure from the meter recommendation to brighten everything up - i.e. increase the exposure.
Something like a half-stop change in exposure may give you a slightly more optimum negative, but unless and until you have been doing this a fair bit you probably won't really appreciate the difference. So don't worry about that, until you have built the sort of experiential feedback loop that only comes with time and experience. Until then, your negatives will probably turn out fine in most cases if you trust the meter, but make adjustments when the need to do so is obvious and clear.
A meter is a tool that's designed to do a task. Where you point it and the exposure settings are up to the photographer.....I think I'm about to reveal just how little I know about film, but I was expecting that once I've nailed down the right ISO for the film + developer + paper combo, I could just set that ISO and trust the camera to do the right thing... I understand why I should overexpose a high-contrast scene so there's detail in the shadows, but I don't understand why I'd have to adjust anything for Christmas dinner vs skiing in sunny-16 conditions. Aside from contrast, why can't I just trust the light meter to take care of it?
Aside from contrast, why can't I just trust the light meter to take care of it?
For the same reason you can't just put the key in the ignition lock and let the car take care of taking you where you want.
But you can go all the way up and down a mountain road with a stick shift in third gear if you wanted to.
The light meter is calibrated to give correct exposure with an average scene reflectance of 18%. That's where the grey cards for metering come from. And most of the time, for most common things, that works great.Now that I see your explanation it makes sense. The light meter likes to make the scene mid-gray. So... it made the beautiful pure-white sand dunes come out yucky grey.
I could just set that ISO and trust the camera to do the right thing
Matt said that certain types of exposure or development mistakes might be easier to manage in the darkroom and others digitally. There is nothing wrong with me wanting to understand why that would be the case. You telling me to use an AI to generate images instead of learning how to handle unintentionally poor negatives can reasonably be interpreted as... uhmm... showing me the door.
With a dedicated film scanner it's dynamic range is low and often doesn't match the wider range of the film
The camera has no user-adjustable hardware gain and thus by default is set to a relatively wide dynamic range (it needs to capture a typical daylight scene after all). Since the gamma of a negative is well below 1, this means that even for a wide-range scene, a negative will only occupy part of the dynamic range of the camera sensor. In practice, this is not really a problem given the relatively clean (noiseless) signal from the camera especially if it's used in RAW format (yielding a bit depth of 12 on 15+ year old cameras or more on modern ones). Moreover, it's doubtful whether a scanner performs much better - and in practice it can be argued to do much worse, since hardware gain may not be available either (instead, software 'gain' is used and simply truncates the available signal depth) and sensor noise performance on typically 20+ year old scanners is likely to be far inferior to that of a modern camera CMOS sensor.But 'scanning' with a digital camera and it's much wide dynamic range copies the negative in all it's detail and tonal range
Professional film scanners have a much larger dynamic range than needed for negatives, as they were originally designed to extract maximum detail from slides. Some so-called “professional” scanners are actually modified flatbeds, I suspect you might be referring them. Many features in new digital cameras, like pixel shift or multi-exposure or multiple native ISOs or 16/48 bit images, were standard in older film scanners, which didn’t have to account for shutter speed or subject movement.I think you can do it all digitally but the technique is important.
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