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I agree that there are good aesthetic reasons to avoid digitization all together (or even just digitize prints). Color correction with scanned negatives can be

I agree that there are good aesthetic reasons to avoid digitization all together (or even just digitize prints). Color correction with scanned negatives can be a true nightmare if you want to preserve the look you would get with a traditional print. Personally, I've always shared pictures primarily through the internet and so traditional printmaking has been less attractive.

paulmd 8y ago
Really, you just have to accept that a print made from a negative is a picture-of-a-picture. There is no inherently "right" way to convert a negative to a positive, any more than there is an inherently "right" color balance for a film to make the first capture with. The color balance and contrast levels you select are just an interpretation of the image, just like the initial exposure. It's not too bad to get color balance right when scanning, as long as you didn't mess up the exposure too badly. Set the white and black points according to the histogram, adjust the gray point until the contrast looks right. Then, if there's color shifts in the highlights or shadows, play with the white/black points on one of the color channels until it looks right. Then pull it into Lightroom and do your final adjustments. It's intimidating at first but mechanically it's not that difficult, after you do a couple rolls you'll have the hang of it. (background: film is basically three separate emulsions with their own color response curves, that happen to look normal when shot at box ISO. The farther you get away from box ISO, the more color shift you tend to get, eg clouds will start going yellow in an overexposed image) Also worth noting that a flat scan is preferred to a high-contrast scan in most cases... you can always increase contrast in Lightroom but you can't pull back data that's clipped to zero or doesn't have sufficient bit-depth for good tonality. To phrase it more specifically, you want to try and allocate a good chunk of your bit depth to whatever tonal ranges are significant for a particular image, while trying not to clip anything to pure black or pure white. Also, you should definitely give wet printing a try, it's a lot of fun for techie types who don't work with their hands for a living. You do pretty much have to be shooting B+W these days, not a whole lot of people still wet-printing color anymore, but as with everything B+W it's quite simple. With variable-contrast paper, you just make a couple exposures on test strips to find your highlight exposure and shadow exposure, then add these to produce a final print (split-filter printing/split-grade printing). You can then scan the finished print, if you like. https://www.ilfordphoto.com/split-grade-printing/ https://www.ilfordphoto.com/split-grade-printing/ It's more of a fun thing than a technical necessity for 8x10 prints of 120 film, there is plenty of detail there for a 8x10 even on a basic flatbed scanner. But if you are doing 8x10s from 35mm film or larger prints from 120, then it's usually noticeably superior to do wet prints. If you are really going balls-to-the-wall on your hybrid digital workflow you can get a decent 8x10 or maybe 11x14 from a 35mm negative, but you'll need something like a Flextight or a drum scanner, which start getting pretty expensive to buy and run. Or, you send it out to a pro shop and pay $100 to have them scan it for you.

paulmd 8y ago

Really, you just have to accept that a print made from a negative is a picture-of-a-picture. There is no inherently "right" way to convert a negative to a positive, any more than there is an inherently "right" color balance for a film to make the first capture with. The color balance and contrast levels you select are just an interpretation of the image, just like the initial exposure. It's not too bad to get color balance right when scanning, as long as you didn't mess up the exposure too badly. Set the white and black points according to the histogram, adjust the gray point until the contrast looks right. Then, if there's color shifts in the highlights or shadows, play with the white/black points on one of the color channels until it looks right. Then pull it into Lightroom and do your final adjustments. It's intimidating at first but mechanically it's not that difficult, after you do a couple rolls you'll have the hang of it. (background: film is basically three separate emulsions with their own color response curves, that happen to look normal when shot at box ISO. The farther you get away from box ISO, the more color shift you tend to get, eg clouds will start going yellow in an overexposed image) Also worth noting that a flat scan is preferred to a high-contrast scan in most cases... you can always increase contrast in Lightroom but you can't pull back data that's clipped to zero or doesn't have sufficient bit-depth for good tonality. To phrase it more specifically, you want to try and allocate a good chunk of your bit depth to whatever tonal ranges are significant for a particular image, while trying not to clip anything to pure black or pure white. Also, you should definitely give wet printing a try, it's a lot of fun for techie types who don't work with their hands for a living. You do pretty much have to be shooting B+W these days, not a whole lot of people still wet-printing color anymore, but as with everything B+W it's quite simple. With variable-contrast paper, you just make a couple exposures on test strips to find your highlight exposure and shadow exposure, then add these to produce a final print (split-filter printing/split-grade printing). You can then scan the finished print, if you like. https://www.ilfordphoto.com/split-grade-printing/ https://www.ilfordphoto.com/split-grade-printing/ It's more of a fun thing than a technical necessity for 8x10 prints of 120 film, there is plenty of detail there for a 8x10 even on a basic flatbed scanner. But if you are doing 8x10s from 35mm film or larger prints from 120, then it's usually noticeably superior to do wet prints. If you are really going balls-to-the-wall on your hybrid digital workflow you can get a decent 8x10 or maybe 11x14 from a 35mm negative, but you'll need something like a Flextight or a drum scanner, which start getting pretty expensive to buy and run. Or, you send it out to a pro shop and pay $100 to have them scan it for you.