Scanned Darkroom Prints Look Awful

[Mamu]

Remember, the point of this thread is scanning prints to show in an online portfolio, not to make a digital copy for reproduction (though of course you can do that). Perhaps I should not have shown a comparison to a film scan as that is somewhat irrelevant to the aforementioned goal stated by the OP. But my point was, with proper editing, one should be able to match whatever source material they are attempting to represent.

Good point. Film vs print scanning deserves it's own thread (if one or more doesn't already exist). Since recording the darkroom experience is the point, capturing the traditional manipulation and even the texture of the print might be desirable. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend copying with a camera. If for display only, that'd probably be plenty of quality and a lot faster for most folks. A raw scan manually sharpened and adjusted is the way to go for printing if one's willing to learn.

[Tin Can]

Mamu, and what if the print is too big to scan and the neg is long gone?

There is no standard. Just endless digi improvement over time and money.


I copied 4 Karsh from a 1959 First edition as practice. Used 4x5 film and enlarged. I matched fairly well. Obviously, I cannot post any of it and none was digitized in any manner.

From Amazon,

"The 96 full page portraits of notable persons from many arenas of life were produced by sheet fed gravure, a printing process that was not yet used in North America in the early 1960s. They were produced by the world-reknowned printing house of Enschede in Haarlem, Holland. The text was first printed by offset lithography on paper especially manufactured for this book in Paris. The gravure printing of the portraits followed. The results are images as close to the quality of Karsh's original mat-finiah prints as had ever been attained by any printing method. The book was perfect bound (not stitching); laid-in is a single-sheet printed prospectus describing the production of the book."

The book is georgeous.

and now we all need 8K TV...