Printing and then scanning?

Hello everyone. I recently got back into analog photography after a 20 year hiatus. I learned to process BW in the 80's when I was a teenager. Never really got good at it but I got the mechanics down. About 1 year ago I picked up the camera again and got into digital. Over the last year I have started shooting film again. As I am sure a bunch of you know getting the wife to agree to turn a room into a dark room when there are real estate constraints can be difficult. I currently develop BW in daylight tanks for 35 mm and 120 and I am sorting out how to develop 4x5 either in a yankee tank or in a patterson tank with the taco method or the M54. Once I have the negative I have been scanning them on an epson V 600 but it is a PITA.

I would eventually like to start printing the negatives myself but because of the current space limitation working with 8x10 or larger trays and a big enlarger is a challenge. I am wondering if contact printing my 645/6x7/4x5 negatives and then scanning them would yield good results. My final media is usually the web but sometimes I have images printed at the local photo store with inkjet printer.

I am thinking that if I can get a small, used almost free enlarger into the little room, develop in small trays and then scan the images it would be a small first step into slowly overcoming the wife's resistance to loosing a room to the photography hobby.

I am sure that I am not the first one with this idea. All guidance apreciated.

Thanks

Joaquin Barbará

Try a vertical development tank, there are a few variations out there. They are very space efficient, and combined with a vertical archival washer you'll only need a few square feet (beyond your enlarger).

I don't think contact printing and scanning will be an improvement over just scanning the negatives.

If you scan for web display, contact printing is more than fine. I have one from a 4x5 negative attached to this thread, and I think it's good enough up to about 1,000 pixels in the long dimension.

If you scan a contact print to make a larger print, you will lose quality, because paper does not have good resolution for that. That is unless you make the prints the same size as the contact prints, or smaller.

If you make digital prints larger than the contact print, you are better off scanning the negative. But the beauty of the contact print is that you have a print that is a reference, which you can use as a guide when you scan the negative. That can be really helpful.

Thomas Bertilsson said:

If you scan for web display, contact printing is more than fine. I have one from a 4x5 negative attached to this thread, and I think it's good enough up to about 1,000 pixels in the long dimension.

If you scan a contact print to make a larger print, you will lose quality, because paper does not have good resolution for that. That is unless you make the prints the same size as the contact prints, or smaller.

If you make digital prints larger than the contact print, you are better off scanning the negative. But the beauty of the contact print is that you have a print that is a reference, which you can use as a guide when you scan the negative. That can be really helpful.

Click to expand...

If you were to print then scan why not simply scan the negative?

Chan Tran said:

If you were to print then scan why not simply scan the negative?

Click to expand...

Because the print will be a reference. And the OP said they don't like scanning negatives.

Check out the user's darkroom threads:

Bathroom and temporary darkrooms: (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

Darkroom portraits (#1: (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

Darkrooms portraits (#2): (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

Thomas Bertilsson said:

If you scan for web display, contact printing is more than fine.

Click to expand...

+1

Here is even more extreme example - 35mm and delta 3200:

Dead Link Removed

Scanning direct from a neg or positive for web display is preferable. But I concur with the foregoing posts that a scan of a contact print is sufficient if there is good tone and clarity.

Consider stacking trays with a tray ladder. Three trays will stack in just over the footprint of one. I do that with 16x20's and have six trays in the space three would take.

http://www.jeffreyglasser.com/