camera scanning b/w negatives - prints are much too flat

I hope this is the right forum...

 

My setup is the Nikon ES-1 slide holder, a Nikon D90 camera, a Nikkor 55mm with M2 ring, and an LED light source. I'm scanning some selected b/w negatives in a six-frame holder, held in place by the ES-1,

 

Negatives look very good, but my prints are much too flat. I'm using Photoshop Elements 13 to process the negative, most are shot at 1/30 sec f/8. The histogram is in the middle, with plenty of room at both ends for fine-tuning. The negative is in NEF (Nikon's version of RAW). The color balance is set for 5000 degrees, the temperature of the LED lamp. I also use Channel Mixer to remove the excessive blue of the LED light source.

 

I'm printing with an Epson 1430, inkset is Paul Roark's Eb6. The inkset contains Eboni carbon for the black, the remaining carts contain varying dilutions of the black. Paper is Red River Aurora Art Natural.

 

Let me know if I need to provide more information. Thanks all!

When you look at the image on screen, with the screen set to some reasonable brightness, does it look right? Going by the histogram, is it an image that should have good contrast? If yes, then look at the printing.

 

It’s been several years since I did any printing using a custom gray ink set (the printer was destroyed in an accident and I never replaced it) so I don’t know whether the state of the art has changed, but back then if you just hit print you’d get messed up output. You had to output a B&W jpg and load it in a special RIP app that has a profile for your printer and in set and print from there. Have you checked with the app or ink maker to see if they have support?

Thanks for the quick feedback. To your first question, yes, the image looks great on the screen. with reasonable brightness.

 

From your description of a print procedure, the process sounds very much like an app called QTRip. Could that be what you used? I'm using it now, I should've mentioned that. The support for that app is very good, Roy Harrington is the author of that program - there was a Yahoo user group he supported. I say "was" a user Yahoo user group, because it seems Yahoo is phasing out their support of groups feature.

 

Roy supported a move to a new group: QuadToneRIP groups.io Group Maybe I should post my question over there as well, but I'll see what kind of response I get here. I came here first because I have a hunch the issue is more than than the QTRip app... it works very well when I convert to b/w conversions from color.

 

Thanks again!

Edited December 6, 2019 by PaulWhiting

If your monitor and printer are calibrated, prints should look essentially the same on both. I use "i1Studio," which includes B&W calibration as well as color for both printer and monitor.

 

You get the best dynamic range if you use the entire histogram. Using just the middle, and blacks and whites are rendered dismal shades of grey. Fine tuning is best done in Curves, by manipulating contrast (slope) in various portions of the curve. Most of the "snap" of a B&W print is in the bottom half of the curve. The best way to make the image pop is to push the curve upward in the center. You can do this by creating one or more nodes in the curve. A better and more flexible approach is to create an S-shaped curve, which has more contrast in the center and more gradation in the dark and light tones. It takes relatively small changes to make a big difference in the results.

 

I generally print B&W in color (effectively CMYK) rather than shades of black and grey. This is known as "process black". I find the tonality warmer (and adjustable) with deeper blacks. Most printers do a decent job converting RGB images to CMYK color, but you might try printing from a CMYK color space. That gives you much more control over the results. You find that done correctly, the black channel is applied sparingly, to enhance only the deepest shadows and outlines.

 

There are many options, such as high key and low key rendering. Regardless, blacks should generally be black, and whites white, but in different proportions.

 

There's always the option to use a RIP. However the good ones are very expensive ($600 and up), and the cheap ones are largely ineffective. "ImagePrint" has both types. The expensive one has a huge library of print profiles, created and tuned from a large sample size (256 points and up). The inexpensive version requires you to provide a profile, which Photoshop and Lightroom can do as well.

 

If you are printing from a Mac, be sure to install the manufacturer's print driver, rather than the do-all driver built into OSX. Find out how to do that at the ImagePrint website.

Edited December 6, 2019 by Ed_Ingold

Yeah, that’s the app I used, with the Piezography brand ink. Definitely look at the support for it, because it’s a pretty specialized process and my best guess is that that’s where the issue is.

Thanks Ed,

 

Perhaps I should've phased my sentence clearer. I am using the whole histogram, but it doesn't occupy the whole space on the horizontal bar... there's unused real estate before and after the curve, and I clip those areas.

 

I'll play with my Curves a bit and see what I can do. I'm using Photoshop Elements and I think its Curves feature has fewer options that the full-blown Photoshop.

The histogram is in the middle, with plenty of room at both ends for fine-tuning.

 

the image looks great on the screen.

 

I'm confused. It might help to post the histogram. Normally, as Ed pointed out, a B&W image with "plenty of room at both ends" looks drab on screen as well as on paper.

 

This suggests two different questions:

 

1. is the image edited to have reasonable contrast? One of you comments suggests yes, while the other suggests no.

2. Is the image on the screen with softproofing similar to the print? I wouldn't expect it to be similar to a fine art paper unless you soft proof because of the lower contrast of uncoated papers, relative to screens.

 

If #1 is yes but the image looks very different in the two media even with softproofing, only two things seem to remain:

 

1. Your monitor is way too bright for editing, and/or

2. The printing process is messed up.

 

I can't address the latter because I use a Canon Prograf, not an Epson, and I print B&W with OEM inks.

Please post a sample image (or portion thereof) and a view of the histogram. If you could scan a print, that would help to know where to begin.

Ed,

 

Was just getting set to do that! Here's the histogram, and I'll post the image next.

 

Paul

So try moving the triangle on either end to just the edges of the "bottom" line and make a test print. That Histogram is pretty flat as explained here:

 

Everything you thought you wanted to know about Histograms

 

Another exhaustive 40 minute video examining:

 

What are histograms. In Photoshop, ACR, Lightroom.

Histograms: clipping color and tones, color spaces and color gamut.

Histogram and Photoshop’s Level’s command.

Histograms don’t tell us our images are good (examples).

Misconceptions about histograms. How they lie.

Histograms and Expose To The Right (ETTR).

Are histograms useful and if so, how?

 

Low rez (YouTube):

High rez: http://digitaldog.net/files/Histogram_Video.mov

Flat! As the Histogram indicates.

There, I've posted a histogram and a flat print. I don't think that photo comes from the same source as the histogram. But I assure you that's the kind of print I'm getting. Please accept these two items as representative! Sometimes the print is lighter. But light or dark, the print is always flat.

 

(Whoops, Digital Dog go to his/her keyboard before I did. And thank you, I know about moving those triangles. Don't have time to watch the video right now.)

 

One thing I don't understand is the term "soft proofing"

 

I'm afraid I'm not doing well here, folks. I'm confused as I try to explain what my problem is, and my confusion makes it difficult for you all to help me. My apologies.

Soft proofing can be on your to do list. For now - yeah, that histogram indicates a flat image. The lack of samples on the left means there aren’t areas of strong whites, and the lack of samples on the right means no strong darks. The image is all mid tones.

Here's a better match between histogram and the original negative - as you can see, I haven't moved the triangles in yet.

 

We see the histogram but what changes are you making using the histogram? You're not, as I see it, showing us anything . . .

I used the Auto command to bracket the black and white points in Curves, then put a little bend into the curve at the low and high end, as shown in the screen shot. The tails of the curve have no significant information. You need to "crop" tighter to the base of the "hill," leaving 1% of the tails in the black/white.

 

The negative of your unaltered post (ctl-I) looks good to me. In fact, I didn't need to bend the curve, but did so for illustration purposes.

 

Edited December 6, 2019 by Ed_Ingold

Soft proofing in Adobe Photoshop CC

What is sof proofing.

Setting up a soft proof.

Saving soft proof presets.

What the simluate ink and paper check boxes do, why to use them.

Making output specific edits in layer sets.

Working with soft proofing in full screen mode.

The Out of Gamut Overlay and why to ignore it.

 

High resolution: http://digitaldog.net/files/SoftProofingInPhotoshopCC.mp4

Low resolution (YouTube):

I made a print on a Canon Selphy CP1200 and scanned it without adjustments. Here is the result...

 

If you plan to do much scanning, the Nikon ES-2 holder is a better choice. It uses slide and film strip holders without the centering and thickness problems you encounter when using holders in an ES-1, which is intended for mounted slides only.

 

I haven't used the CP1200 in several months. Dust and lint tend to accumulate in the exposed area of the top piece of paper hence the dust which isn't in your posted image.

 

The Selphy CP1200 is a dye-sub (actually, dye-transfer) printer on glossy paper. It's as close as you can get to a wet print while keeping your hands dry.

Edited December 6, 2019 by Ed_Ingold

Art paper will have lighter blacks and darker whites than semi-gloss photo paper. However the grey scale should be acceptible within those limits. Soft proofing requires a valid print profile, and will allow you to fine tune the image by emulating its appearance when printed. Other settings on the printer accommodate the thickness of the paper (hence head spacing), and the amount of ink applied. You earn your money making art prints ;)

I didn't know that about art paper, Ed, thank you. But now that you point it out, I'm aware of it.

 

The problem is that the physical print comes out flat, even though the on-screen rendering can look terrific. I'm going to sleep on this thread, let some of it sink in, and return to it tomorrow. Thanks everyone.

If it looks good here, and bad in print, there's something amiss in the printing process.

If it looks good here, and bad in print, there's something amiss in the printing process.

I agree and hence, one should always test output using good color reference images designed for testing all the printing parameters. A color reference images all the RGB values are setup for output and are image editing and display agnostic. By testing the output this way we can examine for the same color issues so we know whether it's your image specific issues causing the problems:

http://www.digitaldog.net/files/2014PrinterTestFileFlat.tif.zip

I didn't know that about art paper, Ed, thank you. But now that you point it out, I'm aware of it.

 

The problem is that the physical print comes out flat, even though the on-screen rendering can look terrific. I'm going to sleep on this thread, let some of it sink in, and return to it tomorrow. Thanks everyone.

 

I think that the image you’ve posted and the histogram look flat to me, and would result in a flat print. Ed’s version, where he’s applied a simple adjustment that added contrast (look at his histogram - see how it has samples throughout including the high and low ends) looks correct to me and would result in a print with good contrast.

 

When you do a camera scan of a negative, the image the raw file converter makes will be very far off. You need to invert it, set the white balance and set the white and black points (the bottom handles in the levels adjustment).

 

I suspect that what is happening is that your monitor is tricking you. It might be in a mode that boosts contrast, making you think the photo has more contrast than is actually in the image file. I suspect that the print you are getting is a more accurate representation of what’s in the file than the monitor is showing. If you got that under control you’d see a low contrast image on the screen and you’d know that you need to pull in the white and black points in the levels adjustment to get a contrasty image.