Black & White printing from scanned 4x5 negs

[Geoffrey Swenson]

I think we should take out Jorge the have a couple of beers to loosen him up and buy him Photoshop since he will have to get to it sooner or later.

For the life of me I cannot understand why he is such a sourpuss when it comes to digital. He has some valid points, but all you have to do is to post something even remotely relevant to pixels and presto, there he goes :-))

“I agree there is nothing wrong in trying digital methods, if this is going to improve the "artistic" content of the print, but if it is only going to be a band aid to poor darkroom procedures, well then probably the digital print will be crappy also. ”

Yes, I have the same opinion, however in the hand of an accomplished printer (often a former analog master) the digital process DOES HAVE more control! Take it or leave it, but this is a fact of life. Traditional printing methods are wonderful tools in the hand of an expert, but the world moves ahead and we’ll be doing things differently than we had been doing in the Middle Ages :-((

[Jay DeFehr]

Geoffry, I hope I don't earn myself the label of sourpuss here,but while you make some valid points, I think your esimation of the future of B&W printing is a little skewed. The digital workflow may or may not offer more control to its practitioners, I'm not in a position to confirm or deny that, but a digital print is a long way from posessing the image quality offered by a traditional darkroom print. I think that the digital workflow represents a tangient to traditional darkroom work more than it does an evolution of it. I don't see darkroom work disapearing in favor of digital methods, but existing along side them for the forseeable future, which, granted, isn't very far. Regardless of the amount of control availabe to the digital worker, a digital print is not a continuous tone print, and as such, will never aproach the quality possible by traditional, chemical methods. That is another fact of life, which you're free to take or leave. Wether or not that difference in quality is worth the differences in methods is for each of us to decide for ourselves, but to deny its existence is dishonest.

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

For the life of me I cannot understand why he is such a sourpuss when it comes to digital. He has some valid points, but all you have to do is to post something even remotely relevant to pixels and presto, there he goes :-))



Funny, if I expose the fallacy that digital is "easier" and has more control, I am a sourpuss and angry. I really dont care about the method, I do care about this continued mistatements and false promises. If you are all so happy with your method, why keep insisting to compare it to traditional methods. I just as soon have you say for me is easier and be done with it. In the end Geoffrey, I assure I will still be taking pictures with my 75 year old Korona far beyond the time you are in PS 10000.1. Dont need it, I do know how to make prints in a darkroom, no need to use all the special tricks that come with PS.

[Brian Ellis]

Jorge - I don't know what others mean when they say that they have more control when printing digitally but when I say that I mean that I can do the same things I could do with traditional darkroom printing but I can do them much better. I can do the equivalent of dodging, burning, flashing, printing different areas of the print at different contrasts, elimination or minimization of distracting elements, unsharp masking, etc. digitally with much more precision and control over the results than is possible in a traditional darkroom. I also can do those things in situtations that would be impossible in a traditional darkroom. For example, last night I made a print that had numerous small tree branches against a light gray sky. I wanted to burn the tree branches but without affecting the background sky. Impossible to do in a traditional darkroom but relatively easy digitally. I also see the results of doing each of those things faster than I can in a traditional darkroom and if I don't like the results I can try again with greater precision and less effort.

Equally important, once I make one adjustment to my liking I can save it and move on to other adjustments without having to worry about repeating the initial adjustment correctly each time I make subsequent adjustments.

Finally, a lot of traditional darkroom work is just pure drudgery that doesn't involve any creative effort - mixing chemicals, jiggling trays, cleaning trays, washing prints, etc. etc. All of that drudge work is eliminated when printing digitally so that almost the entire time I'm printing I'm making and implementing creative decisions. I don't think I typically spend a whole lot less time making a digital print than I did a traditional print. However, my time is better spent because it doesn't take five minutes of jiggling trays to see the results of a change and I don't have to spend time setting up, taking down, cleaning, washing, etc.

For all of these reasons, and probably others that don't come to mind immediately, I believe I make better prints by scanning film and printing digitally than I was able to do for the most part in a traditional darkroom (and I guess I should say, hopefully without sounding immodest, that I'm an excellent traditional darkroom printer, the four weeks I spent taking all of John Sexton's darkroom workshops weren't wasted). I don't think I'm alone in that belief. Several months ago a small group of us participated in a demonstration at an art center where we showed a group of our traditional prints and then showed digital prints from the same negatives. The improvements in the digital prints compared to the traditional prints were very obvious even to the non-photographers in the audience.

I have no problem with you or anyone else who doesn't choose to print digitally for whatever reason. I'm just explaining what I mean when I say that I have greater control when printing digitally since you seemed to think the claims made by digital printers for greater control were invalid.

[Geoffrey Swenson]

Jorge,

Brian said it well, so I won’t. What I try to say is that you don’t have jump on each and every thread and turn it into a vendetta against the Mean Computer People. I’ve said it many times, that it isn’t important how you make your prints as the end the results rein supreme.

Still, to introduce digital somewhere along the process is wise, at least these days. If you want to keep doing what you have been doing all your life then it is fine, but don’t keep insisting that everything new is bad. Some of it is, but computers make your life easier at times. Just think of the ugly work of spotting. It might be a therapy for you but most of us can be without it.

If it is a consolation for you, I do prefer to use film and not digital capture. I like the touch and smell of sheet film, but sadly, eventually I have to give it up. The film companies will make me do it :-((

[Steve J Murray]

Just a little perspective.

Photography is over 100 years old as a technology. Silver prints or platinum prints were not the original medium. I don't know how many different technologies that have been used since the beginning, but it is considerable. Each has their own charm for certain people. What I'm saying is that photography is nothing more than using light to "capture" an image onto a light sensitive medium and then printing it, and nowadays displaying it on a computer screen seems to be another form of presentation, like it or not.

For each individual artist, certain ways of doing this will appeal to him or her more than others, for a variety of reasons. We choose our methods based on the way we like to work and for the results we are trying to achieve. Not too long ago a woman posted a question in this forum about 4x5 and pricing. She mentioned she previously had been making large prints from scanned negs from a Holga camera (cheap/disposable plastic medium format camera) and printing them with a large Epson 7000 inkjet printer. She was getting 2 to 3 thousand dollars each for her prints. This pretty much blew away a lot of people here, but she defended her art quite articulately, making several valid points about the nature and reality of photography and art sales in the modern world.

BTW, this is a great forum and I thoroughly enjoy the vast depth of knowledge found here. A heated debate is OK too once in a while, it shows we're alive!

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

Brian, I understand and know what you are saying. There is no doubt that PS is a very powerful tool and if you so choose you can work on the image pixel by pixel. But all this is immaterial, if you have found a better way to express your photography I am glad for you. But this does not necessarily means your way is better or worse, or that all those controls are necessary to make a good print.

In the end if all this controls were producing significantly better prints, everybody would have changed already and traditional photography would be dead. I have not seen that happened, nor do I see many people saying "wow, I want to learn how to do that" when they see an ink jet print.

Geoffrey, perhaps you failed to read where I talk about buying and accepting digitally produced prints before you and most here even thought about going this way. I, unlike you, have put my money where my mouth is. I accept digital as a viable way to make beautiful prints. I dont accept on the other hand that it "exceeds everything darkroom produced". That is all, and will continue to say so here every time I read it even if it bothers you.

Is time to let digital stand on its own and the work made this way speak for itself, this unceasing comparisons with traditional darkroom work are not benefiting either camp, and to say that digital produced prints exceed anything that can be done in the darkroom is plain wrong.

[Ryan M]

"Is time to let digital stand on its own and the work made this way speak for itself, this unceasing comparisons with traditional darkroom work are not benefiting either camp, and to say that digital produced prints exceed anything that can be done in the darkroom is plain wrong."

Amen Jorge, I can't agree with you more. They are both different mediums. Painting is not printmaking, nor is digital imaging traditional photography.

For me, it really comes down to how I like to work. I can not stand being in front of a computer and I like working in a darkroom. Other people prefer the computer. To each his or her own.

[Geoffrey Swenson]

Jorge,

”Geoffrey, perhaps you failed to read where I talk about buying and accepting digitally produced prints before you and most here even thought about going this way.

No, I remember your saying that!

“”I don’t accept on the other hand that it "exceeds everything darkroom produced".”

I don’t think that the majority of us say that, especially in the case of B&W, and definitely not I. At least not yet.

Is time to let digital stand on its own and the work made this way speak for itself, this unceasing comparisons with traditional darkroom work are not benefiting either camp, and to say that digital produced prints exceed anything that can be done in the darkroom is plain wrong.

I agree with you, but remember your statement when someone, I hope not me, mentions comparisons. Just let it slide :-))

[James_3755]

"Not too long ago a woman posted a question in this forum about 4x5 and pricing. She mentioned she previously had been making large prints from scanned negs from a Holga camera (cheap/disposable plastic medium format camera) and printing them with a large Epson 7000 inkjet printer. She was getting 2 to 3 thousand dollars each for her prints. This pretty much blew away a lot of people here, but she defended her art quite articulately, making several valid points about the nature and reality of photography and art sales in the modern world. "

I'm not saying I'm the world's greatest photographer nor printer but yet I do visit many galleries in a years time. I have notice one thing, digital prints don't sell for the same dollars as wet process does, not even close overall. I know of few digital printers getting this kind of money per print. It easy to stamp a high dollar price tag on anything, the juice is getting it! Maybe she is, then again I would think the name would be fairly known if she was. I think nothing beats platinum or carbon but I've seen some great work out of digital in both color and B&W, but yet it would seem in the world of selling prints digital lags behind across the board compared to the more traditional wet process..

James