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It’s not constant, like the film image is not constant.
One reason why film holders, esp. high quality ones like the Flextights are densely black and flogged to cut down extraneous light.
Sure you can do “something” in post, but completely fix it? No.
Nikons scanners are in many ways the epitome of the macro camera approach. But they where never cheap and I highly doubt they could pull all stops of range out of negative film. At least not in any files I’ve seen.
Again as I wrote earlier, it should be pretty easy to manufacture something at least as good as the Coolscans at a fraction of the original (or used) price today, if some bigger manufacturer should decide to but their weight behind it.
You essentially have to do the equivalent of dodge and burn in camera.
The much maligned Cokin filters and holder is a good cheap entry to do that.
I once had the idea if it would be possible to make a transparent LCD screen filter, that with the image from a simple digital camera could create a mask over the film plane, that would allow slide to capture more detail in contrasty environments.
It’s not constant, like the film image is not constant.
One reason why film holders, esp. high quality ones like the Flextights are densely black and flogged to cut down extraneous light.
Sure you can do “something” in post, but completely fix it? No.
Nikons scanners are in many ways the epitome of the macro camera approach. But they where never cheap and I highly doubt they could pull all stops of range out of negative film. At least not in any files I’ve seen.
Again as I wrote earlier, it should be pretty easy to manufacture something at least as good as the Coolscans at a fraction of the original (or used) price today, if some bigger manufacturer should decide to but their weight behind it.
You essentially have to do the equivalent of dodge and burn in camera.
The much maligned Cokin filters and holder is a good cheap entry to do that.
I once had the idea if it would be possible to make a transparent LCD screen filter, that with the image from a simple digital camera could create a mask over the film plane, that would allow slide to capture more detail in contrasty environments.
While working at Kodak I built a liquid crystal/photo conductor sandwich in 1973. When combined with a color slide it produced an imagewise mask that was used to reduce the contrast when printing the slide onto Ektachrome Paper. I installed it is a 5S printer and made masked Ektachrome Prints. It worked beautifully. It was never commercialized.
While working at Kodak I built a liquid crystal/photo conductor sandwich in 1973. When combined with a color slide it produced an imagewise mask that was used to reduce the contrast when printing the slide onto Ektachrome Paper. I installed it is a 5S printer and made masked Ektachrome Prints. It worked beautifully. It was never commercialized.
Glad to hear someone did it!While working at Kodak I built a liquid crystal/photo conductor sandwich in 1973. When combined with a color slide it produced an imagewise mask that was used to reduce the contrast when printing the slide onto Ektachrome Paper. I installed it is a 5S printer and made masked Ektachrome Prints. It worked beautifully. It was never commercialized.
Does anybody remember Minit mask?Cool. I recall that Agfa presented a related idea, probably in the late 1990s, in one of the IS&T (formerly SPSE) symposiums related to photofinishing. What they had done was to use such an LCD screen, in an optical printer, to produce an unsharp mask over the negative. The idea was, as I recall, that one-hour lab systems were beginning to use scanners as film was loaded into the printer. (These were crude scanners, capable of "index print" quality, but mainly intended to allow advanced estimates of printing exposure/color balance.) So the scan was good enough to produce the image for an unsharp mask. The transparent LCD screen was far enough from the negative to be defocused, and since it only attenuates the light source it doesn't degrade image quality.
When I first saw this I expected it to become a mainstream minilab feature, but for some reason it didn't. It was not too much longer - perhaps a half-dozen years(?) - before high-quality scanning and digital printing exposure went mainstream and there was no long any point to the LCD mask.
Seems like you almost might as well use film, at least for 135 and 120.Does anybody remember Minit mask?
Unless Fuji licensed it from Kodak, then NO. However, 2e is not directly related to LIRF. RF in general is related to another heavy metal.
PE
There are absolute limits to what kind of resolution you can extract from the scanner.
No amount of fiddling with holders, Newton ring free glass or liquids is going to change that.
I use both but favor film because I’m an old dog in photography. I was thinking of using a scan of a negative and printing on OHP film for masking negs. My idea I would use magenta and yellow colors to local contrast. I’m sure it’s done before.Seems like you almost might as well use film, at least for 135 and 120.
Then you can take your time printing and have the exact same mask for future prints.
Anyhow not a very useful technology for in camera use or for dynamically and quickly adjusting during printing.
I use both but favor film because I’m an old dog in photography. I was thinking of using a scan of a negative and printing on OHP film for masking negs. My idea I would use magenta and yellow colors to local contrast. I’m sure it’s done before.
Great reference ! Thanks for posting
The amazing thing is that D-76 stock was used in this test !
Not really. D76 was and probably still is, the release test developer for all B&W films.
PE
Sure, sharpness is a bourgeois concept. But that is a whole load of confirmation biased relativism.Also there are limits in the negative: One thing are lab tests with flat targets with a tripod and another thing is real photography.
In real photography:
> the scene is usually in the DOF and not in the perfect plane of focus, so most has some defocus,
> Many often use a wide aperture for selective focus and the lens is not in peak performance, or sometimes we close a lot for DOF having some diffraction
> handheld shots always have some shake
> textures have no 1000:1 microcontrast, so film does not deliver 150lp/mm but 40lp/mm
So most of the shots are very easy to scan because basic scanners are outresolving what real shots have, there are some excetionally sharp shots that may deserve a drum scan, for sure, but not many, say 1/30.
Anyway, considering cost, it's always cheaper to shot a larger format than paying for an expensive scanning, a drum scan of a 35mm frame may cost $20 to $50, while a MF shot is less than $1, and that MF shot scanned with any decent consumer scanner will be many times better than the drum scanned 35mm shot.
The same happens in LF, if 4x5" has not quality enough for you in the epson then shot 5x7 ! you may have to split 8x10" sheets, but today four 4x5 drum scans pay for the IR googles allowing a convenient splitting.
No doubt that a drum is a way superior machine, the question is when it makes sense or not.
Going back a bit to this thread, it would be interesting to see what evolution film would have had for better scanning.
For the same film speed there is a balance between cloud size and and cloud overlaping, to not generate color noise in the scanning, a color is often mapped in the three color layers, so how clouds overlap may concern noise in the discretization.
perhaps color film could have been re-engineered to increase resolving power from smaller clouds while ensuring a good overlaping. My guess is that if money had been there for R+D then this would have been a field for improcements.
Sure, sharpness is a bourgeois concept. But that is a whole load of confirmation biased relativism.
It's not that hard to get a "perfect shot" on 135 that warrants a scan that is far better than a flatbed.
It's also setting your bar low if you use viewing on a monitor, as any kind of metric of quality.
The human eye is a scanner not a still camera. We build a scene over seconds in hour minds eye, when we scan with seccades and head movement.
It can resolve any resolution your could throw at it under the right circumstances.
42MP is going to run into problems with grain aliasing and won't print as large (whatever that is) as a scan that does justice to the format, or crop cleanly.
You don't have to perfectly resolve grain and grain clusters to have interference patterns happening from the line or matrix of the sensor.
Here on the left is a classic crop from a scanner with very similar resolution to the Epson V7/8XX line. Around 2500 dpi on a good day. On the right is a scan of an enlarged wet print in a flatbed:
I think this technique has a steep learning curve though I've never bought Mr. Ross's PDF. The masking technique is useful for production silver gelatin printing. If this technique is used in the darkroom, do you think this would make each print pretty much the same? Individually dodging and burning prints makes each one unique. Or does it matter anyway?This is the Alan Ross selective masking technique, published 10 years ago. He has used that way for 20 years at least, he has made a number of workshops about that and I know very good printers using it, one in China, some made intercontinental trips to attend those workshops. It was published in International Photo Technik magazine, IIRC, in his web site that article can be purchased in pdf.
https://alan-ross-photography.myshopify.com/collections/pdfs/products/selective-masking
Amazingly that technique was mostly overlooked, but it's one of the most powerful techniques we may use in darkroom printing, IMO.
PM if you are interested in that way, I've some experince with it, I'd be happy if I can help.
If this technique is used in the darkroom, do you think this would make each print pretty much the same? Individually dodging and burning prints makes each one unique. Or does it matter anyway?
I think this technique has a steep learning curve though I've never bought Mr. Ross's PDF.
How would you have scanned better?This was badly scanned, sensors have pixel binning for lower resolutions, voltage from several contiguous pixels in the row are averaged before being fed to ampli and A/D, less conversions is faster.
If you see that noise it's "transversal", in rectangles, I guess this comes from the pixel binning, (I guess that the image was scanned 90º rotated).
This comes from a bad practice, not from a bad scanner, you may also obtain funny effects in a drum, if the drum operator is clumsy enough.
Nobody mentioned before that this "classic crop" may have pixel binning effect from a bad practice?
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