Don't be sorry, I hope you do try it one day when you are ready and do it the way you want to
Armchair quarterbacks never win any game...
Originally Posted by RLangham
Don't be sorry, I hope you do try it one day when you are ready and do it the way you want to
Armchair quarterbacks never win any game...
Tin Can
Oh, I'll certainly get around to it. A working front shutter will probably be the prerequisite... I come to realize that this is going to take more precise exposures than I can manage using the time exposure feature on the back shutter. Also I can't get any TMAX into my budget right noe!
There's nothing armchair quarterback about it if someone actually knows what they're talking about. For decades people spent entire careers doing color separations. Off-brand film is going to cost you way more in money and time and sheer frustration in the long run; and you'll never land securely on first base anyway, let alone get past it. It's better to do your densitometer boot camp up front. And you could easily burn up several 50-sheet boxes of TMax just learning to play the chords. Been there, done that. Some dye transfer printers allocated 15 sheets of film per image. Filter factors differ at long exposures, and many pan films simply cannot get all three separations in synch. The tremendous advantage of doing it on pan film with a long balanced straight line is that you can dig about ten stops of accurate color separation out of it. You simply cannot do that with any color film. Someone is going to argue about the significant latitude of traditional color neg films, but in that case the dye curves overlap on a significant portion of the scale and are not crisply separated at all . And simply shooting and PS-balancing a color checker chart is only the equivalent range of color transparency film, even less range. But the gist of this is that you need to match the separations to your intended output medium.
Welcome to the forum I guess.
Just ignore Drew honestly. Make your own way. Can't learn until you fail after all, regardless of process/difficulty.
You have nothing to apologize for. You asked a question, people responded and the thread drifted. Thread drift is a fact of life on on-line forums. The original poster doesn't own the discussion and can't control where it goes.
Last edited by Dan Fromm; 16-Feb-2020 at 19:10.
its really not that hard, and its too bad folks make it seem harder than it actually is !
to be honest, the hardest part is stacking all 3 layers on eachother perfectly after you scan them, and before you do anything else,
( you use the cropping tool and make them all exactly the same so when you stack them in your layers box in photoshop they sit right and don't "frill". )
honestly, if you are going the hybrid route it takes less than no time to expose the negatives, no time to process the film and no time to drag and drop the files into their own image...
i hate to suggest this on a LF website, but you can easily do a dry run with a miniature 35 and see how simple it is.. and then use a bigger negative once you are hooked ...
and then once you are hooked see what film works best for you and fine tune your approach with hard core technical revisions to your boot strap origin story.
What if a person actually sees some qualitative potential in this? A half-baked approach means they're just going to have to start all over at some point. A lot of time and money will just be wasted - for what? Saving twenty bucks on a box of discount film? Anybody can bake a cake too. Whether it tastes good or not is a different story. Yeah, some things have gotten easier doing hybrid workflow. Not necessarily better, but certainly faster. But if you start out with roadkill, just how much time do you want to waste trying to make it look alive again? Once someone actually starts plotting tricolor curves the truth comes out. On this thread, even the need to match curves is being called in question, or apparently not even perceived. How are you going to downsize to an economical 35mm or 120 film test unless the film involved is capable of matched tricolor development times on the very same roll? Only one film can do that, and it's TMax100. Then you still have to establish actual filter factors, which might not even reasonably match the published factors at long exposures. So what you might get away with shooting 35mm film at relatively large apertures is likely to need recalibration when switching to LF and small lens stops. So if you do go the small film route first, stop down as much as your lens will allow. That will obviously affect sharpness due to diffraction, but that's a non-issue for gray card or color chart testing.
Drew:
I am certain your way is fantastic, and well worth pursuing, but it isn't the only way. If someone just wants to try large format photography for the first time, should they go out and purchase a $20,000 20x24 Ebony camera and set of 5 brand newS+S 2ox24 film holders and 4 boxes of tmx, a schneider xxl 1200mm lens and 4 boxes of tmx for testing the waters and seeing if Large format photography is worth doing, or should they purchase a maybe a graphic viewII, a few used film holders, an old wollensak 150 lens and a box of ilford hp5+ ?
I'm sure some might say if the hopeful LF candidate might as well spend the $35,000 on the ULF camera, and while they are at it a densitometer, a clean room, drum scanner and new darkroom, but some might also say the calumet might be good enough.
There are certain basics. Low budget, high budget aren't the issue. What does matter is having the information on the film to begin with. And in this case, all three exposures need to be balanced in that respect, not only at midtone, but over the complete range. Otherwise, it's not true tricolor photography, but something less. If that's the look you want, fine. People do all kinds of fun things. No crime. Yes, I do have a cleanroom as well as a couple of densitometers. That's fairly routine for color printmakers. If lint and dust marks are somebody's idea of creativity, that's their artistic right. With tricolor you'll have a real fun time with dust marks. Triple the fun. Want to try HP5 for color separations? Just do it. But it's not the film that even Ilford recommends for that application, and there's a reason why not. Nor is a film like ACROS ideal because it's not even true panchromatic, but orthopan, which means the red filter reproduction will be truncated at some point. So Corran just lucked out using a 25 rather than 29 filter.
I would think a rectangular strip with three square filters in it, placed in a cokin-style filter holder, would allow for rapid switching between colors, and a wide-latitude film (Bergger pancro?) would help lessen the impact of the different filters.
I'm fairly certain Prokudin-Gorsky didn't have a densitometer or a histogram function, yet his plates scanned into Photoshop a century later with minimal fuss.
Granted, he did it that way because it was the only way then, but there's some merit in the process anyway.
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