Tonal adjustments of scanned negatives

I wandered into a new park I hadn't been to before last Saturday and took a series of shots with my 4x5. It was a very cloudy day, so contrast in the scene was pretty low. I measured all of 3-4 stops difference between rocks and sky. To get things as wide as I wanted I used my 90mm lens, which is ancient and tends to kill contrast.

Naturally, the resulting negatives are really really flat and I've been working on correcting them, either during the scan or in Lightzone.

This got me thinking, though.

Is it better to adjust for exposure and contrast as you develop the film (ala the zone system), or to leave your negatives to standard development times and correct either in the scanning software or later on as you process the files? Is it the same for exposure adjustment and contrast, or are they different?

What I've seen in this case is that I developed everything in the bog standard fashion - N development. The first couple attempts at digital processing made minimal adjustments to the scan and then ended up with very flat tones and no contrast at all in many areas (rocks that had texture looking like smooth flat areas). I started over and scanned with some heavy adjustment to curves and black and white points in the scanner software, which brought out a lot of texture that I'd been missing. It doesn't seem to have added a lot of film grain to the scan, and the resulting file has been much easier to work with in Lightzone.

So... has anyone investigated whether it's better to use varied development techniques vs correcting on the digital side? I'm curious about what sort of experiences others have had.

Erik: I do not develop my own film so I cannot truly offer the level of guidance you want. I have , however, had films developed for greater contrast with varying degrees of success. From this experience I would much prefer getting a contrast-flat negative conventionally and carefully developed (increasingly hard to come by, in itself, today), carefully scan it, and then use digital methods to elicit my intentions from the image.

I certainly like the fact that I can re-do the digital side of things, whereas if I do it with chemicals I get one shot. I just can't tell if that's sacrificing some amount of information, perhaps in the shadows or highlights (where the film grain shows the most).

Perhaps I'll try doing some head to head comparisons once I've gotten a little more comfortable with developing my negatives.

Maybe down the road you might post some of these images.

Glad yo are getting out there and using the camera.

Has your new camera arrived?

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

Maybe down the road you might post some of these images.

Glad yo are getting out there and using the camera.

Has your new camera arrived?

Asher

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I'll try and put together some kind of omnibus post of them all, or at least a few before and after pairs. I'm finding that post processing is taking much much longer than it does on my 20D, making it hard for me to reach a "final" image. It's actually making me seriously consider buying a Mac Pro, which I would never have done before.

Plus I'm still adjusting to the new way of doing things, which interferes with making shots I really like. Once I can do the technical bits on autopilot I'll be able to start making much better images - at least that's the way it's been with previous cameras. Worrying about the technical aspects interferes with my creativity.

My new camera shipped from Japan on Dec 5, but hasn't arrived at the store yet. I'm vaguely hoping it will arrive before I leave for vacation the week after Christmas.

What is that?

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

What is that?

Click to expand...

The Pedernales River on a very overcast day. I was standing on a sandbar, looking across the river at some limestone boulders and cypress stumps along the side of the water. It was around 9:00 AM and the temperature was ~35 or 40 degrees. I just missed catching a great blue heron that flew in, landed on one of those rocks (just after I'd loaded film), paused and then jumped down behind the rock.

It was one of the three images from last Saturday that had me thinking about contrast and exposure control. All three were very very flat, low contrast negatives and I've spent several hours on each trying to get contrast high enough to make me happy with the images without significant banding.

I've discovered that VueScan actually does a better job of avoiding banding than Lightzone in this case. I'm better off adjusting black and white points, as well as the curve between them in VueScan, then doing fine adjustments in Lightzone. Otherwise I lose a lot of detail. As an added bonus, playing with those settings in VueScan (even running the PPC binary on an Intel Mac) is faster than doing it in Lightzone.