Drew, I explored synthetic grain, and I found it is a nice aesthetic tool, I guess it can be a very powerful effect for a Pro photographer not wanting to shot film to get a vintage look. Not for LF, but grain structure has a remarkable cultural heritage, nothing wrong in adding fake grain if one likes it. Me, I want the real grains cooked on paper with the 138...Originally Posted by Drew Wiley
The supplier has informed me that they use Tmax 400. I think there will be enough grain in the neg, no need to add anything.
Well, I wasn't intending the remark as a wisecrack, but to stimulate a little thought. I'm on the run, just waiting for a darkroom tempering box to equalize, so will make it brief. I seldom use grainy films like Tri-X, but do happen to love the way certain vintage films rendered their combination of strong grain and tonality, whether in still or moving images; and it's a look that just seems a bit fake and disappointing in faux digitized fashion. Something is a bit off. At one time I did shoot certain subjects with very grainy high speed Agfachrome and surely miss its unique soft hue pallete combined with blended large grain. High-speed Scotchchrome was more pointillistic, but interesting too. Yet neo-grain digital replacements just don't satisfy me. I just haven't encountered any worthy replacement for the look of those vintage films yet, despite all the look-alike apps that are going hog wild at the moment.
At 30-32 frames a roll of 220 in 645, he'll have chosen it because it was the best compromise between getting medium format quality & 135 quantities of exposures per roll. TXP happened to be pretty much the only 220 BW film available at the time, and the whole fake grain thing on the digital files was simply to vaguely attempt to match up the aesthetic to the extant work. Sometimes (often) practicality & speed of working overpower arcane obsessions with processes. Aesthetics that would hold up over time do not seem to have been at the forefront of Salgado's purpose in making this body of work.
None of the fake grain plugins are very convincing - and they're not helped by poor sharpening approaches by users. I suppose if someone's frame of reference is the vibrating camera-shake-esque unsharpness of a consumer flatbed (not surprising given that its optical path is a bunch of mirrors & a lens held in place by little metal clips more at home in a cheap certificate frame), fake grain might look ok, but a high end scan or competent darkroom print rather shows up the limitations of the plugins.
Cinema has a rather easier time because of the nature of how it is viewed, but even there, fake grain noise can be pretty obvious.
Not that vaguely, the exhibition was pretty consistent, only a true expert would have said what prints were from real TXP and what had fake grain printed with the LVT, me I had doubts that I cleared from the year the 32 expeditions were made, and of course general public noticed absolutely no difference.
He wanted TX, but he used TXP because it was made in 220. TXP was developed in Calbe 49 to approach TX.
IMHO it depends on the person who is editing, if he is a true artist or not...
...but authenticity is authenticity, I feel no need to use fake grain if I can play with real silver. IMHO the debate is not about if fake grain is better or worse, the interesting thing is if we value the authenticity of a pure optic process or not.
Well, I'd far rather see an old movie on gritty b&w film by a master cameraman than any of these new hybrid or digitized ones. But from the standpoint of monetary profit, it's the noisy cluttered teen-oriented action flicks that are bringing in the big money, so there you have it.
If you consider the stages the negatives & raw files went through to get to the final images, you potentially have two different sets of film grain, scanner & sensor noise, the effects of whatever retouching/ HDR/ fake overdone ferricyaniding went into it, then adding a little grain-like noise would probably even things out - and I don't think any more consideration went into it than that DxO had a purported simulation of Tri-x grain & it didn't look bad in the context of its use. A shortlist of 'looks' would probably have been prepared & he chose the one he liked.
Nah, the answer is probably far less exciting. Salgado wanted finer grain from the film & A49 is pretty much the only extra fine grain developers available in greater than 1L packaging quantities in the last couple of decades. If you are running a deep tank line to handle dozens of rolls, this makes a huge difference! Perceptol might be better than the somewhat wooly grain the current A49 formulation tends towards, but it's been a very long time since you could buy 5L packages of the Ilford product & I can't recall if Microdol-X had European distribution in larger packaging sizes in the early 2000's. Besides, TXP is claimed to be slightly finer grain than TX, more likely it was a desire to get closer to 6x7 smoothness in a more convenient, lighter weight format with autofocus.
Photojournalists have their kinds of priorities, and I have my own, which happen to differ with respect to my own 35mm work versus LF, but in neither case involves a photo journalistic model. I shoot MF more with high detail and rich tonality in mind, just like my LF work, rather than 35mm, which I prefer simplified and sometimes even grainy. But Salgado ...and now Amazonia and its tribes are in an accelerated stage of threat from a new Brazilian administration which openly classifies all that as expendable. I personally grew up among Indians who still had older examples who were born in the stone age and died in the jet age, often poorer than at first. Most of those of my own generation never reached 30, whereas many of their grandparents went well over 100. So much for the benefits of civilization! But I documented such things elliptically, by the cultural remains, LF style. Same for the ephemeral gold rush, which outright exterminated most of the Indians slightly further north in the 1800's, much like the gold and oil and mass crop rush in Amazonia has already begun to do today. So I do appreciate good photojournalists; I'm just not one of them.
I don't think, see this, by Philippe Bachelier:
"In relation to the choice of the film, Salgado realized immediately that Kodak Tri-X 400 that he prefers in 24x36mm existed only in 120 format. The 220 emulsion is different and it is called Tri-X 320. Its sensitivity is 320 and its sensitometric characteristics were conceived more for studio shots with controlled lighting than for photo reports. With TXP it is more complicated to work with backlight, the classic "light of Salgado", and push processing is also more complicated. The choice of the Tri-X 320 was reasonable, since choosing 120 film (with its limited number of frames) would have meant carrying twice as many rolls. Therefore it was necessary to adapt the development by me (Bachelier) and by the laboratory "Imaginoir", since we shared most of the development job. I ended up using Calbe A49 developer (currently sold by Adox, as Atomal 49) to get close to the performance of Tri-X 400."
_____
So... us¡ng 220 film format allowed to carry only 30kg of film, 600 rolls, in each adventure, instead hauling 1200 rolls. Also, I'd say, a session with a challenging subject has less interruptions with 220...
IMHO they used the A49 in a way to get a compensating effect, just to overcome the TXP drawbacks in expeditionary usage.
It required an intense work to match the Canon 5Ds digital images with TXP, not only because of grain, also tonality had to match, this required that the LVT negatives had to be printed to perform as required on the selected papers (Ilford Warmtone FB and Bergger Variable CB), LVT negatives were printed in Dupon lab, overseen by Gonzague Perney.
The context was really challenging, not only a global exhibition was there, also Taschen had to print a Sumo book, and Taschen does not print botched jobs...
I'll bet Randy has one of these in a box somewhere...
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