how to scan soft focus negatives

[Marko Trebusak]

I know that this could be controversial question to ask, but such is my reality :o. I like soft focus lenses, but for various reasons I'm not interested in cameras bigger than 5x4, although my output are 30cm x 40cm palladium prints. So not to my question: how do you folks that use SF lens scan your negatives? My preferred method for anastigmats is to develop quite flat and adjust contrast and other things in PS. But from my conversation with Russ Young (and by reading his dissertation), I imagine, that I might "blend" glowing highlights by doing so. So I'm all ears :D.

Cheers,
Marko

[jp]

I just scanned a few myself that I took with Russ's gear.

I just scan them like I would a normal LF negative. Yes, you can make minor curve adjustments in the highlights and get a big change in the glow of highlights. Adjust to suit taste I guess. I'm not going to mess with that much till I get a better working understanding of the glass. I don't want to be thinking about photoshopping while out in the field, film holder in hand.

[John MacManus]

Mark, I have been scanning film exposed with soft focus lenses for a while and understand what you are saying. I try to obtain an unmanipulated scan: no clipping, no sharpening, no ICE, no nothin', just BW bits. I look at it in PS and decide how it should look to satisfy me while retaining the soft focus, massing of lights/darks, luminosity, pearly highlights, whatever quality of the lens I want to retain. I find I do have to alter contrast [also in the darkroom] presumably because SF lenses by their nature form images with "lower" contrast. I don't sharpen in PS in any way which may be a mistake since I am not correcting for scanning errors. Dodging/burning are added as required.

So my advice is just go scan your SF negatives and see how happy you are with the inkjet prints, or silver prints from a digital negative. You decide what's satisfactory.

Enjoy ... J

[Allen in Montreal]

I recently tried to scan a negative shot with a Softar ll and the scanner would not complete the scan and gave an focus error message.

[D. Bryant]

I recently tried to scan a negative shot with a Softar ll and the scanner would not complete the scan and gave an focus error message.

What? This makes no sense at all.

Don Bryant

[Allen in Montreal]

What? This makes no sense at all.

Don Bryant

I have tried it several times and after the preview scan, which looks fine, the scanner shuts down and says it can not resolve the focus. I have yet to find a way to over ride the focus.

Heidelberg Topaz, Linocolor 6 on OS 9 Mac G3.

It makes great scans on normal negs, despite the scanner getting not much respect from some, I have made some really nice wet scans with it. It has given me a very good introduction to the world of large format negative scanning.
But I just can't get it to scan the negs shot with the Softar ll.

[sanking]

What? This makes no sense at all.

Don Bryant

Scanners that focus automatically do so on the basis of contrast differences in the negative or transparency and work best when there is a lot of fine details with high contrast. I have never scanned a negative made with a soft focus lens but I can see that the lack of detail and contrast might pose a problem.

On a related not I recently scanned a negative in two passes and tried to stitch the parts together in Photoshop. When the image would not merge I looked at two layers and saw that for some reason the scan was made slightly out of focus. So you also need well focused layers with good contrast to stitch with photomerge in Photoshop.

Sandy King

[domaz]

Heidelberg Topaz, Linocolor 6 on OS 9 Mac G3.

It makes great scans on normal negs, despite the scanner getting not much respect from some, I have made some really nice wet scans with it. It has given me a very good introduction to the world of large format negative scanning.
But I just can't get it to scan the negs shot with the Softar ll.

Can you manually focus the scanner or otherwise fix the focus? That's a pretty high end scanner- you think it would have some kind of way to do that. My junky old Minolta DImage Multi even has that option although I've never actually used it.