Photo Techniques and Pyro Again

[David A. Goldfarb]

People who have success with scanning pyro negs seem in general to be drum scanning or using a fairly new scanner or slightly older high-end scanner with higher Dmax (or possibly are producing thinner negs targeted for scanning). On my old Agfa Duoscan and Nikon LS-4500AF, I tend to run into problems like banding with pyro negs that I don't get with other kinds of negs.

[Francesco]

I agree David. The pyro negs that can be scanned satisfactorily must be "thin" negatives because it is virtually impossible for me to get anything when scanning the pyro negs I make for AZO contact printing. It is just too dense for the scanner to "see" anything. Anyone AZO contact printing had any success scanning their pyro negs?

Francesco (www.cicoli.com)

[sanking]

"I am interested in more info you may have concerning the remarks on highlight separation. I also continue to wonder if pyro offers any advantages to scanning . . . “

Whether the type of highlight compression you get with PMK and VC papers is a good thing or bad thing is for you to decide. But there is no question but that the look that you get in the highlights with this type of compensation is very different from what you would get if you were to just burn in the highlights as you might have to do with a conventional negative, or as you would have to do with a PMK negative printing on graded papers.

One very interesting observation made by Bond is that the compression works much better with a film such as TRI-X. This film has a curve that is quite different from other films in that it has a continuous increase in slope, which tends to counter the tendency of PMK to give highlight compression. This particular characteristic of TRI-X is one of the main reasons it has for so long been popular with Pt./Pd printers because the increase in slope compensates for the very long gradual shoulder of the Pt./Pd processes and gives greater separation in these areas.

As for the scanning pyro negatives I find that they scan very well. I have been scanning both PMK and Pyrocat-HD negatives for several years and the results have been excellent. And my negatives are certainly not thin since they were developed for alternative printing and have a rather high density range. At this time I am using the Epson 4870 and I have not encountered a negative yet that would not scan well with this machine.