Developing for scanning?

HI,

I'm new here so bear with me...

I've been experimenting with stand development in Rodinal and just processed my first roll of 120 this way [I've only been doing 35mm before as I didn't have a universal tank]...

Maco UP25 - Developed at 1:200 for 90 minutes. Agitated for the first minute and then given a couple of gentle inversions about half way through.

The negatives look pretty good -- really sharp, maybe a little thick. Superficially, through a loupe, they look the nicest I've done so far.

However, when I tried scanning them, the results weren't as good as the thin looking, underdeveloped and rather flat 35mm negs I did the same day [in Calbe A49] which looked pretty good after some level adjustments to brighten them up a little.

The stand developed 120 negs scan with too much contrast and not enough mid tones.

Any tips for developing with scanning in mind? I had tried stand development as I thought it would reduce contrast -- rather than expand it.

I don't have facilities to make my own prints at the moment.

developing for scans

It depends on what software you use to load the scanned image. I had a similar problem, turns out the "automatic" scan software was the culprit.

If you have the capability, turn off the auto feature of the scan/software/scanner and manually adjust the image before scanning, i.e. in a prescan.

You should then be able to get whatever you want for digital printing.

mcgrattan said:

I had tried stand development as I thought it would reduce contrast -- rather than expand it.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you should try a shorter development time on your next run - to reduce the overall contrast.

Kirk Keyes said:

Perhaps you should try a shorter development time on your next run - to reduce the overall contrast.

Click to expand...

I'll second that. It sounds like you're running up against the dmax of your scanner. While an enlarger can punch through bullet-proof negs, a scanner is at ease with the thin areas, not the dense ones. When I still considered scanning a viable option to get to a print, I developed for thinner negs.

Now I have two enlargers and some Agfa Neutol, and am back to developing for nice densities.

This depends very much on the scanner, but most if not all will eventually reach a point where you see excessive grain and even banding in the scan, even though the negatives in question still print well. My Agfa Arcus 1200 seems to handle dense negatives pretty well, comparatively, but the general rule is that thinner negatives scan better. Software can help -- Vuescan, especially, is capable of making multiple passes and averaging them to reduce the noise that shows up as banding and "grain" from a dense negative -- but in the end, most scanners have trouble with B&W negatives that are as dense as I was taught to make them 30-some years ago. I dread what will happen when I finally get my darkroom set up enough to try printing the negatives I've been making for scanning for the past year -- hopefully I won't have to print them for 4 seconds at f/16 on a #5 filter...

In my experience, it's best to reduce development time to produce a thinner neg for scanning, if you're not planning to make conventional prints.

As others have already mentioned, thinner negatives scan better than very dense ones, though the newer scanners tend to handle a high density range or maximum density much better than older ones.

Also, my experience is that pyro stained negatives tend to scan very well, perhaps better than traditional negatives when developed to the same effective printing density. Negatives developed in non-staining developers that are over-exposed (or have a high B+F from fog) and a high density range are quite difficult to scan without artifacts such as banding. I have scanned a lot of 5X7 negatives developed in both traditional non-staining developers and in staining developers, primarily PMK and Pyrocat-HD and I will say without hesitation that the stained negatives are definitely much easier to scan. I have seen 40X50" inkjet prints made from scans of 8X10" Pyrocat-HD negatives and the results were very impressive, on a par in every respect with results from Xtol.

I should add that since I am an alternative printer I have been developing all of my negatives on sheet film to a fairly high density range (log 1.5 or higher) for many years so my negatives tend to have a much higher DR than those of silver printers.

If scanning is your goal I would not recommend developing film in Rodinal with stand development, especially with high speed films. Even in normal dilutions the grain of Rodinal is very pronounced and when you dilute the developer even further for stand development the grain can take on legendary proportions, not good for scanning.

Sandy

sanking said:

Also, my experience is that pyro stained negatives tend to scan very well, perhaps better than traditional negatives when developed to the same effective printing density.

Click to expand...

To add to this idea, if you used PMK with a film that stained at least moderately well, you could get 3 different levels of contrast by choosing which CCD sensor you used in your scanner - i.e the red, green, or blue sensors individually. Your scanner software may allow you to scan in B&W using only one of those sensors, instead of all 3 together. Or, scan in color, and then pick the color channel that gives you the most suitable range of contrast.

I suggest PMK for this as I know that the stain in PMK has little absorbtion in the red region, a bit more in the green, and yet more in the blue. (I haven't looked at Pyrocat in this respect so I can't really say if it would work like this.) And of course, the developed silver in the neg will set your "baseline level".

Kirk - www.keyesphoto.com

Kirk Keyes said:

Your scanner software may allow you to scan in B&W using only one of those sensors, instead of all 3 together. Or, scan in color, and then pick the color channel that gives you the most suitable range of contrast.

Kirk - www.keyesphoto.com

Click to expand...

I just listened to a report on NPR that described how scholars have been able to use multi spectral digital photography to recover some writings on papyrus over 2000 years old by authors such as Euripides, Sophocles and a successor to Homer known to the ancients but whose texts did not make it through the middle ages.

Sandy