From B&W film to digital printing

[lungovw]

Hello,

I shoot in B&W film and normally print in fiber paper (traditional darkroom)
I also use sometimes a Epson 4870 scanner and a HP printer with 6 colors cartridges.
But in this digital part I have several doubts... 4 of them are crucial.

What would you recommend?
Scanning in JPG, TIF, other?
Which gamma?
Scanning in grayscale or color?
Should I convert to anything different before printing?

Case that is too much for a thread I would also appreciate some reference texts or web sites. I tried manuals but they list all that is possible while I need something more directive.

Thanks for any help.

Rgds


Wagner Lungov

[venchka]

My choices:

TIFF
Adjust gamma to suit negative and my mood.
16 bit greyscale to keep the file size down. Sometimes I scan B&W negatives as 48 bit transparencies and invert in the scanning software.
I print TIFF files from Adobe Lightroom. It handles everything.

Hope that helped.

[m332720]

TIFF
Gama 2.2
48 bit RGB files are close to 400 mb but if I am going to take the time to scan I want to get all of the information I can out of the negative
I send 16 bit PSD files to my printer from Photoshop CS3

[Joseph O'Neil]

TIFF

Don't know about greyscale vs colour - depnds on what you need. For small work, I find scanning in greyscale works fine, but for large reprints, even if the image is all black & white, use colour scanning. Huge files, but in greyscale - at least I think so - you seem to loose detail, information, at the very least, you loose the "emotional" effect of using warm tone VS cold tone paper.

As for gamma, no idea. test and experiment. After many years I personally still find callibtating your monitor to your printer for proper output a complete PITA. Others do nnot have that same issue, but even if it takes you a day (or two) of testing to get it right, do it.

good luck
joe

[Tyler Boley]

These questions imply broader issues to look at and have a lot of "it depends" answers. I'd recommend Amadou's book-
http://www.masteringdigitalbwbook.com/
and any of the Real World Photoshop series.
Tyler

[lungovw]

Thank you all for your feed back.
Now I have an idea as starting point and will also order the book for further improvements. Cool!!

Best regards,

WL

[Bruce Watson]

These questions imply broader issues to look at and have a lot of "it depends" answers. I'd recommend Amadou's book http://www.masteringdigitalbwbook.com/ and any of the Real World Photoshop series.
Tyler

What Tyler said. Amadou's book gives the direction that you seem to want. Very good book, highly recommended.

[nathanm]

I print TIFF files from Adobe Lightroom. It handles everything.
Except image dimensions in excess of 10,000 pixels. :(

lungovw, scan your images no larger than the size you plan on printing them at. Excessive data just serves to bog down your machine and your creativity in my experience. 16-bit grayscales are a pain enough, but a 48-bit color scan would just be untenable in my view. I guess if you plan on running a simple curves adjustment and be done it would be okay, but once you start adding layers you might as well get used to seeing spinning beachballs\hourglasses and creeping progress bars.

[venchka]

Except image dimensions in excess of 10,000 pixels. :(



Aye. There's the rub. When scanning 4x5 negatives on an Epson 4990 I limit the scan to 1,800 spi.

[venchka]

...

lungovw, scan your images no larger than the size you plan on printing them at.



Can someone explain this in "Scanning for Dummies-That would be me" terms?

[nathanm]

If you want a 16x20" print size on the paper, then scan your neg at 360ppi and whatever percentage will get you there. You can dice the numbers up any way you want, but I prefer to ignore the scanner's ppi number and just think in terms of the final dpi and percentage of enlargement.

[venchka]

Thanks. I can understand that. No "make it bigger & downsize for printing". Got it.

[Wallace_Billingham]

Can someone explain this in "Scanning for Dummies-That would be me" terms?

the idea behind this theory is that digital printers print at 300 DPI (Dots per inch). So if you plan on making an 8x10 print of a 4x5 negative you should scan at 600DPI by doing so you keep your file size down which helps with hard drive space and processing power/speed in programs like Photoshop.

However I have found when using Epson flatbed scannera that they work best by scanning at higher resolutions than that. I scan all my B&W negatives at 2400 DPI and save them as 16bit grayscale TIFFs. This will create a pretty big file with LF or MF film. Then I open the file up in Photoshop (any flavor of CS or Elements 5 or above) and then use it to downsample the file using "Bicubic Sharper" under the edit>>image size>> window. I then set the controls to resize at my largest print size that I ever think I will print at 300DPI. I don't shoot anything bigger than 4x5 but if I did I would do the same thing only scan at 1200DPI.

[Tyler Boley]

Contemporary Epson model's native resolution is 360 or 720 dpi, depending on driver settings, I don't know what Canons and HPs are. Many find large files sizes an inconvenience, however the larger up to and over the printer resolution generally the better. But this is not a "for dummies" easy issue, because it's further complicated by how much real information is on the film, ofter far less then the above. How to generate pixels beyond the source detail, and whether that is necessary, is then the next complication. How's that for no help at all???
Tyler

[Tyler Boley]

sorry, should have been ppi for the printer, they put down far more dpi. Confused yet?
Tyler

[Paul Kierstead]

lungovw, scan your images no larger than the size you plan on printing them at. Excessive data just serves to bog down your machine and your creativity in my experience.

I try to have my cake and eat it too. I scan big (well, about as big as my poor little epson gets away with ... about 1600 dpi). I do it care, clean and wet mounted if I intend to make something people will see. I very lightly sharpen ("capture sharpen") and spot the big feller. I call this my "Master" and stop it there. When I get to making a real print, I dup this big feller and resize it to the final size, and do all further work on that one. Otherwise my sad old first-gen Intel iMac kinda keels over and makes me ... upset ... at the waiting. Maybe the next gen will allow lots of memory and I'll buy one.

The downside of even this one is that if your adjustments are extensive (particularly if they involve masks), you'll have to recreate them if you decide to do a larger print. But dealing with my huge "master" files using multiple layers is impractical on my system. YMMV.

[nathanm]

That's actually a pretty good idea, Paul. A two-stage process. So does wet mounting put a decent sized dent in the amount of dust spotting you have to do on the file? It's been many years since I've oil mounted a slide, and that was always 35mm.

[Lenny Eiger]

I don't connect printing size to scan size - at least not on the minimum end of things. When scanning, I also consider archiving. Many types of film fade, others have problems due to water or fire or loss. It's not a bad idea to get all of the image in a place - in addition to the original, just in case.

Also, if one makes an 8x10 and finds out that everyone wants a copy, it might be that they want to make a 20x24. If you scan it fully in the first place, then you don't have to scan it again. (Especially if you are paying for scans...) Also, if you make corrections, spot, mask, etc. on the main file then you don't have to reproduce that in a smaller format.

I always scan to the fullest, and then if I need less that's fine. If I need more, its right there. Just a different philosophy.

Lenny

[fuland123]

Extremely impressive!

[neil poulsen]

I'm not sure which "gamma" you mean. If it's the gammy for calibrating your monitor, definitely use 2.2. That is the industry standard. The 1.8 gamma that you hear about was for early MacIntosh computers and is no longer relevant.

[venchka]

Interesting idea about gamma. With my ancient Epson 1280, Gamma 2.2 works fine for Moab entrada natural rag. However, as I discovered yesterday after wasting a bunch of paper and ink, The 1280 and Epson luster paper prints correctly at gamma 1.8. Go figure.