Scanning dark room prints with flatbd (V500)

[Athiril]

Just got into shooting ilford multigrade iv (pearl) paper direct in camera in my 4x5" camera and developing with rodinal with pretty decent results Also surprised that when the second one came out really low contrast (first was high) I was able to separate and see low contrast detail in photoshop from it and restore it to a good contrast (second was developed and shot differently).

Which has given me the desire to set up a proper dark room to do printing.

Anyway, the thought occurred to me since Im definately seeing very good detail scanning @ 3200 dpi then sharpening and pulling down to 1200 dpi, that I could enlarge my 35mm work onto 8x10 prints, scan at 1200 dpi (or 3200 dpi if it gives better results) and pull down to 400 dpi in photoshop, of which this is well well well below what the scanner, paper and enlarger can resolve.

So my thinking is that it would get all (or most) of the detail out of a 35mm negative, and make an excellent scan (in comparison to 35mm frame scanning on my V500).

Has anyone tried this?

Is it worth doing when I set up my dark room (eventually)?

 

[Marco B]

Scanning an 8x10 sized darkroom print at anything above 600ppi is useless, and is only bound to clog up your computer and RAM and not give you any useful extra detail. Resolutions of 1200-3200ppi are only useful in direct negative scanning.

Personally, for scanning darkroom prints, I prefer to directly scan at a maximum of 400ppi. Scanning at higher resolution in my opinion doesn't add anything in terms of extracted detail, but only compounds issues with dust. At resolutions of 600ppi and above, each tiny dust speck will be visible and need to be removed in Photoshop. 400ppi is a good compromise between extracted detail and wasteful dust ridden scans.

With these kind of scans, I have been able to reproduce, and even enlarge to about 1.5 times, very satisfactory reproductions printed on my R2400, that come very close to "the real thing".

Marco

 

[Marco B]

And yes, for low grade flatbedscanners, the results of scanning an 8x10 darkroom print versus scanning the negative directly, will generally result in a much better scan from the darkroom print, at least for prints sized about 8x10.

Of course, with a high grade filmscanner, things are different, but still, depending on negative size and print size of your photo, the darkroom print scan will hold up very well.