A need for scanning specific film?

[jon_noble]

I was just thinking. If colour negative film has a limited range of

brightness values that is contained by 2x10^14 colours, are we losing

a lot of these colours by trying to remove the orange layer?

 

Surely if the orange was gone we would have more colours to play with?

I know its there for a reason for traditional printing which i fail to

remember at this moment.

 

Any ideas?

[john_shriver]

Nothing is lost due to the orange layer. It just causes the HD curves for the three emulsions to be shifted relative to each other.

 

It also has nothing to do with the levels of brightness possible in each layer. Color negative films have much lower contrast than B&W films, and the papers have correspondingly higher contrast to get the resulting contrast ratio correct.

 

You can see what the total brightness range (in stops) possible in all films from the H-D curves. You'll see that B&W has 9 stops of range, color negative less, and color transparency (slide) even less (about 5 stops).

 

How many colors you get to play with has NOTHING to do with the brightness range. That has to do with the color gamut of the three dyes used in the three emulsion layers. You can't output any color whose inverse isn't inside the triangle of colors those dyes define. Of course, you can stretch the color space in the digital domain.