Exposing Black and White Film For Scanning Dynamic range

All my workflow at the moment is of a hybrid setup, I make the photographs on black and white negative film, do all my own developing and then scan them and process them in Photoshop before printing.

Equipment

Mamiya 645 Pro
Epson V800 with Better-Scanning Holder
Epson R3880 Printer

When you do your initial exposure calculations, how far do you find you can push the highlights before the scanner is unable to reproduce any detail.

Can you push them to say Zone 8 ?

Scanners can grab a lot of detail. Since your process is hybrid, I don't see an issue. If you expose the shot and develop it with pushing, you're going to risk blowing the highlights, but with the proper developer those highlights can be compressed so you retain more details.

Am I missing something? This isn't a scanner issue this is proper exposure and development.

The dynamic range of the scanners is adjustable depending on what you want to scan, but you have to be sure you aren't totally blowing the highlights or you won't see any detail in the image.

I've also found that lower density negatives can sometimes scan better overall, but that is dependent on what I'm looking to actually get from an image.

Please ask further questions of I'm missing something.

I have just developed a fresh roll, this time producing lower density negatives, I will report back after they have dried sufficiently to scan

I have not deliberately experimented with this, but have always found that a slightly over exposed (by accident) and normal development will leave the highlights 'manageable' but will also leave plenty of detail in the shadows too. When I say slightly over exposed I mean about 1/3rd to 2/3ds of a stop (FP3 @ 100 or 80 ISO instead of 125). A soft working developer would also help here.

The dynamic range of the scanner will depend on the type. PMTs (drum) have a higher real range than CCDs (your V800). Slide films have a DMax above 3.0, with some being 3.3. CCD scanners have a very hard time producing clean images at this range, but luckily it's in the shadows. With negative film the image gets reversed so the noise ends up in the highlights. But neither type of scanner should be taxed when scanning black and white negative film. If you are developing your negatives with a gamma in the normal range of 0.5 to 0.6 your film densities will rarely be higher than 1.8, so they will be easily captured by your scanner. You could probably over expose them several stops and still get decent highlight tonality as long as you haven't hit the film's shoulder (hard to do with modern film).

If you are having problems it's probably related to the scanner interface and not the hardware. Try scanning the negative as a positive with full range (use 16bit for this). You will probably see a lot of empty space on both ends of the histogram. If that's the case you are not exceeding your scanner's limits. Invert in photoshop, set the black point to the negative rebate and the white point to just above your brightest point using levels or curves. That should give you a good starting point for adjustments.

ianbarber said:

I have just developed a fresh roll, this time producing lower density negatives, I will report back after they have dried sufficiently to scan

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Looking forward to seeing if there are improvements.

L Gebhardt said:

The dynamic range of the scanner will depend on the type. PMTs (drum) have a higher real range than CCDs (your V800).

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Has there been any published testing done to show this difference?