Pushing TriX & Scanning

[waynecrider]

I shot a roll of TriX in 35mm at night at a friends folk concert at 1250 ISO and developed it in Diafine. TF4 fix and washed thoroughly, not that TF4 needs it. Scanned it on a Epson 4490 at 2400; Just info. My resulting files are slightly cool, apparently from the base. I work in Elements 6 (yeah I'm that far back) and the files look more neutral but uploaded to Flickr they still have that cast. Here's an example; Shack in the Back | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Is this basically what I can expect from this film at night without further adjustments thru such as changing the file to RGB and tweaking color temperature, hue/saturation; Which doesn't seem to matter all that much.

So, in the meantime, I'm getting setup to wet print certain of these negs on a color head enlarger. I'll dial in contrast. How much of a problem will the base be?
I'm wondering if I can shoot Portra 400 instead, push it 1-1/2 stops and convert for a better b&w file? What's your experiences?

 

[L Gebhardt]

Ideally your black and white film scans should end up in a single channel, so there will be no color to them at all (but brightness info). You can set that in the Epson Scan software. I don't know how Elements works, but you should be able to change the mode to grayscale. Or at least desaturate them. I pulled your image down and it's perfectly neutral. Every sample has all three color channels having the same value. So it looks like you did everything correctly. So the problem is in your display. Have you profiled your monitor? The image looks neutral on Flickr too, on my calibrated display.

The film base will not effect the wet printing enough to notice. I haven't used diafine in ages, but it had a neutral base if I recall. Either way it's only going to be a minor and global contrast change. In other words not something to worry about.

I've never tried pushing Portra 400, so no idea how it will behave. But your TriX shot looks lovely to me. I wouldn't change the process if you can get a wet print as nice as your scan. Also, with Portra you won't get a black and white print at all, so that may be a strike against it.

 

[gmikol]

The file you linked to on Flickr is saved as a grayscale file. There's a chance that any hue or tint you're seeing is from an un-calibrated or poorly-calibrated monitor. Is your monitor calibrated/profiled?

Also, the linked file's embedded profile was "Dot Gain 20%". This is a poor choice for a continuous-tone grayscale working space. I don't know whether Elements has a choice, but you should make sure your scanning software and Photoshop are using "Gray Gamma 2.2" as the grayscale working space, if you can. Also make sure you're using a color-managed browser, and it's set up correctly. You'll have to do a little research as to which other browsers that is, but I know Firefox supports color management, and it doesn't appear as if flickr strips embedded profiles.

--Greg

 

[waynecrider]

Yep I think you guys are right. It's got to be my monitor. I'll probably be buying a new one so will profile that when I get it. Thanks for the check on the image and letting me know. It's a big help to have people like you guys giving a hand.