film testing for scanning

[andy138]

I think I'm going to be switching films soon, which leads to everyones favorite subject - film testing. 95% of my film will be scanned which makes me wonder if I should test the film (iso and dev time) for an ideal neg for a scan. Is this something I should do? Is there an "ideal" density range for a scan? Any suggestions on if I should do this and if so, what would be a good approach? Or should I test as I would for silver printing, and use that to make scans? Thanks alot.

Andy T.

 

[mkochsch]

I think the big question is do you also intend to print straight from the negative to paper at some point? Developing for scanner may make this difficult in the future.
The wisdom about developing a negative for scanning used to say "develop thin" , say to a grade 4 or grade 5, so you don't exceed the scanner's ability to capture the highlights. But these days, depending on the scanner, that might be a moot point. If you "developed thick" many scanners can easily capture very thick densities. Do you get "more tonality" by developing thick? I don't know? Where the fall out in quality would hit with any particular film is another good question. Eventually the highlights may start to block up and get grainy.
~m

 

[Katharine Thayer]

Hi, for whatever it's worth, here's a previous thread on the same subject:

http://www.hybridphoto.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9

 

[andy138]

i've been using tri-x 320 4x5 dev in rollo pyro and have had pretty good luck with scanning those on a epson 4990. i'm thinking about going to fp4 (simply because i dont kno how much longer kodak will be making film) and continuing with rollo pyro. I was also thinking that with long range negs it might make sense to do several scans (one for shadow density, one for highlight density)and composite the two images in PS. does this make sense? thanks for the input everyone.

Andy T