scott_eaton4

I find it disturbing that most people here are bickering about the type of water used to mix the developer rather than the obvious issue of the scan quality. Waiting for Adam Sandler to show up and offer his opinion :-)

 

Unless the laws of physics have changed since I've scanned B&W film, we concluded long ago here that film scanners varied to an extreme degree in their ability to scan conventional B&W film. Depending on the profiles used in the scanner, or where black / white points are set, grain can be either subtle and remarkable, or look like grainy snowballs as per the example.

 

For all we know this is a Walmart or Frontier scan from Tri-X. If the poster is having commerial scans made, then he's wasting his time with conventional B&W white film and needs to switch to color print and desaturate. If he's scanning himself, try switching to a slide film profile on the scanner, and then inverting in Photoshop. This is a classic 'hack' to get a better black/white point and not pull out the grain so much with B&W film.

 

Given optimum scanning, my experience with the later versions of Tri-X are that they have a bit more acutance than earlier versions, along with edging out HP5 in terms of sharpness. Tmax 400 has a bit finer grain than Tri-X, but at the expense of density range which gives B&W film it's 'character' anyways. I'll otherwise take Tri-X Pro in Rodinal or HP5 Processed in HC-110 over Tmax 400 anyday - provided I'm shooting 6x7 or larger given it's the only way to get good scans from the medium.

<I>Transparencies destroy digital for high-end detail retention and subtlety of gradation. </i><P>Why doesn't your gallery reflect this? Seriously, can you provide me with an image *you* shot with 35mm slide film that I can't match the 'subtlety and graduation' with my dSLR.

<i>"Why does this picture look so bad"</i><P>

 

The over-all middle tones are pink - at least on my monitor. A million reasons.......<P>

 

First, the the reason the image is a bit bland is because you are using a wedding film to shoot scenics. All print film are inherently low contrast - just some more than others. <P>

 

The biggest problem here is the scan. Doesn't matter how 'highly regarded' the shop is. Sending a color neg out to be commercially scanned, even it it's a top notch lab, involves more variables in terms of color and contrast than color slides. The lab likely doesn't have profiles for 160S either, so the next the roll of film you send, even if it's a highly regarded pro film will come out a bit blue, or green. How is the scanner supposed to know what color the sand is? Where's the white point? If you sent them a neg of a bride in a white wedding dress, chances are it would come back better because well, 160S was designed for that sort of stuff.<P>

 

If you're going to keep shooting film and want it commercially scanned you'll need to either (1) get used to using Photoshop and correcting their images. Or (2) Switch to Astia slide film because *most* commercial labs will have a little better time getting the color right with slide scans than print film scans. Just the nature of the beast - deal with it. Or (3), get your own scanner.