Rescans

Hello All

On the suggestion of Bill I have rescanned the image of the "princess dress" from the Fed2 Kentmere 100 developed in Pryocat HD

First is my original scan second is a rescan with no adjustment and third is the rescan with reduced brightness and contrast.

 

Any comments or criticisms are welcomed

 

http://pic100.picturetrail.com/VOL596/2374373/5806389/413535103.jpg

http://pic100.picturetrail.com/VOL596/2374373/5806389/413535101.jpg

http://pic100.picturetrail.com/VOL596/2374373/5806389/413535102.jpg

I would pick the second as the best.

This is a subject of some interest to me -- how do your photos look to others on their monitors. On mine, the difference in these is so subtle as be nearly nonexistent. The third possibly has slightly better detail to the gown IMO.

My original post to Don was to use his existing scan and twiddle his editor controls so that the bright fold of the dress started to show detail. The pyro developers "appear" to hold an extra two (2) Zones during scanning. That fold will probably yield a solid Z 6, perhaps Z 7 while the dark brick area to the right will still have detail at Z 2. I am seeing this in his 3rd rescan. Many times I see this extended range on my negatives and now exploit the feature in some of my vistas/scenic with the MF cameras. Bill

Here's an adjustment using "curves" facility in PS. If your scanning software is adequate, Don, you should be able to achieve this in your pre-scan setup. I use Silverfast SE, which enables a full range of adjustments, and the software that comes with Epson scanners is also perfectly adequate but a little clumsier to use. I'm no fan of the Zone System in that I've always felt it's unnecessarily complicated, but I think the adjustment below is probably a little closer to those requirements.

 

After "Curves"

 

Arguably the best way to find out whether your scan has adequate shadow and highlight details is to study the raw/linear scan ie before applying any adjustments (contrast, brightness, curves etc) on either the scanner or photo editor. A linear scan might not be visually appealing but it holds all the information that the scanner was able to get from the negative without distorting/destroying it. Often the information is distorted/destroyed because of scanner's auto exposure/tone curve settings rendering subsequent analysis/comparison of scans meaningless. Linear scan allows you to compare results of one developer against another in a reasonably meaningful way.

Sandy: The way to ensure pictures are the same on different computers is to set them up to use the same gray gamma and color space. When you import a photo into Photoshop it reads the colourspace of the photo and asks whether you want to use the embedded color space or convert it to the working space. The easiest way to achieve this is to set all the devices attached to your computer to use the sRGB colour space. Also you have to set your operating system to use the same sRGB colour space. sRGB seems to be the default color space. Don't try to understand it all. That way lies madness.

Hello All

Thanks for the comments and suggestions etc.

 

I am using an old Epson Perfection 3200 with Vuescan.

I am looking at getting a new scanner soon.

I am adjusting using the limited PS Elements 2.0

I try to adjust to what looks good to me and on my screen.

Don, if you go to this site:

Photoshop Elements > Step Wedge - The Understanding Tool

and download the step wedge. On my monitor the two darker steps run together. Open the same file in Photoshop with a working space of sRGB etc. On my monitor the step wedge now appears with evenly spaced steps. You can now tweak your photo file until it looks right. The last step is to assign a profile to the image. If another user opens the file in a colour managed application there should be a warning message that the profile of the image is not the same as the working space.

Do colorspaces come into play on B&W photos? I would have thought that only brightness and contrast settings on the monitor would be relevant, once the file is saved with whatever adjustments were made.

Frankly, PS Elements 2.0 is really quite very limited. And in my (limited) experience with scans, there is usually quite a lot of room to recover highlights and shadows (Rick's example above speaks volumes, I think), for which there is a real advantage to have an editor that can work on 16-bits TIFF. Which PSE 2.0 cannot.

If you have a reasonable recent PC or Mac, have a look at Affinity Photo - it's a very competent editor, costing less than PS Elements. Sure it will have a bit of a learning curve, but it is a program that won't limit you in any serious way any time soon.

 

[edit] Sure you can also correct a number of these things during scanning; at least, I'm positive you can with Silverfast and VueScan. But a decent editor afterwards is worth it anyway (for cloning out dust etc.), so investing some time and money in a good piece of software is, in my view, something that will always pay off.

One excellent utility I use for organising all my image files is Fastone Image Viewer, a free program that has a great range of manipulation tools, including cloning/healing, and a handy ability to display multiple images side by side. It can initiate scanning and image downloads from camera or cards, and it's invaluable for moving files around, using the Explorer interface. Google it and you'll find it.

Arguably the best way to find out whether your scan has adequate shadow and highlight details is to study the raw/linear scan ie before applying any adjustments (contrast, brightness, curves etc) on either the scanner or photo editor. A linear scan might not be visually appealing but it holds all the information that the scanner was able to get from the negative without distorting/destroying it. Often the information is distorted/destroyed because of scanner's auto exposure/tone curve settings rendering subsequent analysis/comparison of scans meaningless. Linear scan allows you to compare results of one developer against another in a reasonably meaningful way.

Raghu is correct. The OP changing the settings for the scan is basically a post processing change that can be done with post processing software. When you change the settings in the scanner or apply Auto function, all that's happening is that these adjustments are applied to the scan results. A scanner is limited by it's physical specifications. You can't get blood from a turnip.

 

After a lot of experimentation, I finally settled on scanning flat. No adjustments during the scan. I then use Lightroom to adjust the scan results. Why learn another processing program for the scanner when you can do all the adjustment afterwards. This also eliminates multiple time-consuming scans as scanner adjustment might not work the best so you have to scan again and again. My way, you scan once forever.

The OP changing the settings for the scan is basically a post processing change that can be done with post processing software. When you change the settings in the scanner or apply Auto function, all that's happening is that these adjustments are applied to the scan results. A scanner is limited by it's physical specifications. You can't get blood from a turnip

 

I can't agree, Alan. my workflow consists of pre-scanning all the images in the carrier, selecting one to scan, enlarging it up full-frame in the scanning software and making all necessary alterations to ensure that the scan will capture the full tonal range, with details in shadow and highlight areas. Then, and only then, I scan. Very rarely do I have to re-scan, and the "processing program for the scanner" is merely a simplified version of Lightroom or PS, no additional "learning" required. Just scanning blindly in the hope you can salvage the image in post-processing is akin to trying to resurrect a poor negative in the darkroom. No amount of post-processing will compensate for a truly lousy scan, and a good scan requires very little subsequent post-processing.

Edited September 6, 2017 by rick_drawbridge

Rick, you've some of the best scans I've seen on Photo.Net and in the rest of the Internet. Clearly, you've evolved a workflow that produces consistently good results for you. Scanning is a frustrating and perplexing process to many like me partly because not much is known to us about how a scanner + scanner software combination work together. I wish we had someone who worked on Epson or some such scanner R&D in this group to help us understand scanners better (someone like PhotoEngineer). Having said that, I'm not really sure the alterations you make thru scanner software have any effect on the raw scan that the scanner hardware produces. Like Alan I believe that all the alterations that you make using the scanner software are postprocessing operations on the raw scan and is done by the scanner software after the raw scan has been produced by the scanner hardware. A linear/raw scan has all the tonal details that the scanner was able to get. Whether you do alterations using the scanner software or on Lightroom/PhotoShop is a matter of taste and convenience. A lousy scan is one where one is sloppy with the controls that the scanner software provides. More often than not, scanner software's default setting produces lousy scan. A linear/raw scan is not a lousy scan. It doesn't appear visually pleasing but it has all the tonal details which can be adjusted to one's taste in Lightroom/Photoshop to produce a pleasing final 'print'.

Rick, you've some of the best scans I've seen on Photo.Net and in the rest of the Internet

 

Thanks Raghu, but I should point out that you're not looking at a scan, but at an image that originated as a scan and has undergone various digital manipulations before appearing on your screen. A scanner is merely an electro-mechanical device that just obeys the orders received from the software that drives it. It's incapable of making decisions, or scanning on it's own. I'm not to sure about using the terms "linear/raw" when referring to a scanner, though they may have relevance to the software.

 

The Silverfast SE software I use with the Epson V700 scanner has pre-set profiles for a very large variety of films, no doubt based on some densometric data. However, I decided that they couldn't accommodate factors such as variations produced by differing developers and development, the use of various filtration, departures from box speed, etc; I looked through the options and decided that the profile for Ilford Pan F 50 Plus offered the best average tonality for my typical negatives, and I've stuck with it ever since. When asked, the program produces a "pre-scan" which I guess is the equivalent of your raw scan. This may (or may not) be seriously deficient in some areas of the image, particularly in the areas of delicate tonality such as clouds, or the detail in a head of blond hair. Should I hit the "scan" command at this juncture I would probably never be able to reclaim this detail , so I adjust it in the pre-scan, using the tools the Silverfast designers intended for this task.

 

Subsequent adjustments in LR or PS are much easier and less extreme if compensations are made at the pre-scanning level. However, as always, it's just a matter of what works best in an individual's workflow, and so long as we're happy with the way our images appear on screen, then there's no reason to change.

On this 2012 312€ 15,6" laptop third image seems to be most succesfull with highlights.