Called a test strip, and yes it wastes paper. Or you can buy an RH timer with the density probe, but it costs more than the test strips and will still waste paper.
That should be money and time well spent. LOriginally Posted by Steven Ruttenberg
Called a test strip, and yes it wastes paper. Or you can buy an RH timer with the density probe, but it costs more than the test strips and will still waste paper.
That should be money and time well spent. L
Getting "acceptable" results with color is easier because the careful burning and dodging and contrast masking required for contrast control require a serious commitment of time and materials to learn. It can be every bit as challenging as black and white. I printed custom color orders for a large camera store and I never even learned the contrast masking techniques master printers of cibachrome and dye-transfer use. Making custom c-prints, I found myself doing even more, though very subtle burning and dodging. You can't get away with as much. Even the lower contrast papers are very high contrast compared to modern color imaging or black and white. Picking up color printing if you are above the novice black and white printing level might seem easy depending on how well you see color, but both black and white and color printing (even specific processes within each) offer a lifetime of challenge to get the best we can do. IMOH too often quality comes down to what a customer is willing to pay for and not holding ourselves to the perfectionism to which the master photographers of the past held themselves. You do have to do your on printing to have real control as they did. I recommend black and white not because offers more artistic expression on a technical level, but because color chemistry will give you cancer. Mastering it can cost you your life. Color isn't easier, it's just that most people never even knew the possibilities. People shot transparencies thinking they had final artistic control and then gave an internegative to a printer who was behind the actual creation of the print...and that was an artistic craft all its own.
It looks to me that today's RA-4 papers are very oriented to digital processing (laser exposed). With digital process a paper with "high saturation" look can do all, as saturation can be easily lowered in the digital image.
In fact the industry started punishing optical color printers long ago. When digital minilabs started ruling in the market then films changed. Negative color films were re-engineered (in general) to have larger clouds in order to allow an easier scanning, followed by a digital sharpening.
Colour neg papers are the least contrasty of colour print materials, but are still pretty seriously contrasty compared to any BW materials. I recall someone (Ctein?) commenting that they started at at least 3.5 (in BW terms) & went upwards by a grade or so from there. Saturation is adjustable by pre/ post flashes, really a question of getting their colour balances correct. Getting rid of saturation is rather easier than adding it with chromogenic materials!
The big change in CN films happened with the introduction of Portra in the late 90's & was not to do with scanning (I think grain related & the apparent density of the neg, but can't remember) - after all there were NC, VC, UC & T variants of Portra, which does not suggest a film intended for digital post-production only. The current variants largely reflect what were the most popular of those options at the speeds in question.
The biggest changes for scanning have really only been in the supercoat. Because of the way most minilab scanners work (pixel shift & stitch), they may inherently produce less noise than some high end scanners where the effective aperture cannot be adjusted. Over aggressive use of the USM by the operator/ software is a different matter...
But this is rather beside the point. Printing at a competent level is not an engineering problem to be solved by technology, rather it is about understanding just enough of the applied science to be able to make the art you want to make. It's the difference between being able to play a musical instrument at a technical level & playing it expressively/ creatively & that's the point at which nothing substitutes for a few hundred sheets of paper. Most people discover fairly quickly that 'correct' prints aren't as pleasing as those that have been manipulated to something closer to what they imagined they'd seen. And at the end of the day that was the point of the zone system & its derivatives - not to necessarily represent 'reality' but to enable the photographer to distort that reality via exposure & process of the negative so that it would deliver that intention on a specific grade of paper. And personal preference will further inform your printing approach - for example, I might set 80-100M on a DeVere head to put the shadows where I want them, even if the negative might be more 'correct' for G3 & selectively post-flash the highlights with white light as I find it can be more convincing than a 00 burn.
This will be a fun journey. The more film I do, the more I find I am not as good at image making as my mind told me I was with digital and printing digital. While I have produced good results, I find the film is not forgiving. You take your shots, do everything right or so you think, get home, develop and come to find out you toasted the highlights, wasted the shadows, your composition was what you thought it would be, and so on. And since you only have 1 or 2 images of a scene, if one of those are not correct (as far as being usable) then your done. With digital, you might end up with 10-20 or more of a scene and by virtue of statistics you will get at least one usable image. That isn't art or learning the craft, that is just dumb luck. So, with film, I am being more disappointed in learning I am not as good as I thought I was. But I will get there thru practice and doing.
That is the same for printing. I suspect I will suck at first, get better, suck again, but thru practice and patience, I will arrive at where I want to be.
interneg, if the color clouds of the different layers are not overlaping this ends in noise when scanning at high resolution, the popularization of digital minilabs led to larger clouds in CN films.
The PORTRA 160 datasheet says "Film features a significantly finer grain structure for improved scanning and enlargement capability in today's workflow"
Well, first is that CN films have clouds and no grain... second is that manufacturers never want to say "larger color clouds"
Lots of good advice above. If you use two test strips and make one working print to get a satisfactory print, you've done a good job using materials with minimum waste. You can get good enough to get within less than 1 stop by eye and still wind up wasting whole sheets on close but not quite perfect prints if you try to bypass test strips.
My basic procedure is as follows:
Once I've got the image focused with lens wide open, I stop it all the way down and then open up till I can just make out the image (usually about 2 stops). Try to put your strip in a spot where you have both shadow and highlight detail all the way across the strip. Hold a piece of cardboard to cover up 2/3 of the strip and set timer for 20". Hitting as close as you can to the time, move your cover over when you hit 10" and then reveal entire strip at 5". This should give you 3 bands each one full stop apart. Even if you have to use up a couple more strips, adjust your time and/or aperture until you get a strip with one band too dark, one about right and one too lite. There are lots of methods people use. This is just a basic outline of what works for me. Good luck!
Actually, I believe that color films do have silver halide grains that are removed and replaced by dye clouds in the bleach/fix. You can see the effects of grain structure with the grain magnifier when focusing for making large prints. I think what the marketing guys were crowing about is just the engineered (T-grain) technology like T-Max as opposed to something like Tri-X.
A color negative film only has grains a few minutes while processed, the first developer converts some of the halide crystals to silvers grains, but the bleach removes those grains.
Probably marketing guys don't even understand what's a crystal, a grain or a color cloud. Here marketing guys say that scanning is easier, but they don't say that this is because of larger clouds.
Slide film like Velvia or Provia (also sporting a kind of tabular technology) have smaller clouds, so having better resolving power, but at the cost of being more difficult to scan at HighRes, that's easy to see with a powerful scanner like a Nikon LS 5000 or 9000, because of effects in the discretization.
Last edited by Pere Casals; 23-Oct-2018 at 11:45.
I second Mamu's suggestion of making test strips with one stop intervals. It really helps if that first strip gets you within the ball park. After that, smaller increments are useful; I usually do a strip spanning 3 or 4 stops and then a strip with 2 second intervals. Sometimes the second strip isn't even necessary and the first gets me sufficiently close to take it from there. The multi-stop strip is also useful to approximate the time needed to burn or dodge areas.
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