Expansion and contraction

Hello everyone - one of the things that I miss about "wet" development is the ability to do negative

expansion and contraction (e.g. Ansel Adam's concept of N+1 or N-1, etc development). I haven't been

able to figure out a good way to do this within Photoshop without introducing an unacceptable amount of

noise. Has anyone else come against/gotten through this problem? Or is there something I'm simply

missing? I did a search for anything on this beforehand and didn't find anything - so my apologies if this

has already been answered. Thanks! Kier

I'll assume you are scanning film and outputting digitally. You can still employ contrast adjusting development. Actually, I find a slightly thinner neg (about N-1) scans better (especially on consumer grade equipment) with less noise in the highlights than a denser neg. Adding contrast or N+ is quite easy in the digital darkroom, especially with careful curves adjustment, and not just the global contrast slider. It is a more difficult task if your neg is already contrasty or overly dense and you need to burn the highlights. Negs scanned on professional grade equipment will give the best chance of burning highlights without introducing too much noise. If noisy highlights are still a problem, selective use of Noise Ninja in sky/highlight areas works well.

If the negative is well within your scanner's dynamic range, consider inreasing exposure to reduce scanner noise in highlights.

 

If the negative has highlight noise and inreasing exposure would clip the shadows, consider scanning twice at different exposure values and combining the scans using masks or a program like Photomatix (free trial does a good job).

Photoshop's highlight/shadow tool is also helpful.

thanks for the responses - this is actually from my digital slr - sorry if i misled there. i'll try the curves and the shadow/highlight. i was using levels with unsatisfactory results.