Erik DeBill
New member
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.
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.