I'm curious: HP5 Neg came out in color

[mitrajoon]

I shot this today with my Wista. 2 seconds at F/22. Developed in Diafine and scanned with an Epson 750. I used Epson software. I did use color negative and 48 bit setting because I had read somewhere that you get more info to work with. I was surprised that the wood credenza came out the exact shade of brown it actually is and the rest of the photo was a nice blue (actual color of the wall). The only true B&W was the photo on the wall which is a B&W image of mine.

I am really curious as to how HP5 can produce these colors.

[Mark Sawyer]

I'm curious too. Does the negative show color? I tend to suspect it's a scanning artifact...

[Duolab123]

When I was a kid I once thought our black and white tv was getting a fuzzy distant station in color. I think I was just hallucinating from a fever

Who knows, maybe Epson has some bizarre AI software that's taking over.

[ic-racer]

Not only is it in color, it is reversed black to white. If this is a negative then the dark areas should be light. Looks like you used color transparency film.

[Corran]

That's not color. The base of the film is also not perfectly "grey." It's just a monochrome image tinted by whatever settings your scanner had when adjusting the curves.

[paulbarden]

That's not color. The base of the film is also not perfectly "grey." It's just a monochrome image tinted by whatever settings your scanner had when adjusting the curves.

Agreed. This is the scanner imposing tints.

[mitrajoon]

Thanks for the responses. First I can assure you this is a 4x5 HP5 image. What I showed was a digital scan of the negative, i.e., the positive. The negative is in fact B&W. I am just curious as to why/how the "positive" shows colors. A couple of you have said it has something to do with the Epson Scanner software. I am pretty much a newbie, but I thought I would have heard of this before. I also didn't see anything on this phenomenon when I did an internet search. I actually like the effect in this case and of course can make it pure B&W if I want.

I'd still like to know the rationale for this.

[Tin Can]

I think this is HP5 you can count the notches if you like, they are visible

Many scan in color and convert to B&W in various ways

I like this exactly as scanned

Color selfie by TIN CAN COLLEGE, on Flickr

[Corran]

Thanks for the responses. First I can assure you this is a 4x5 HP5 image. What I showed was a digital scan of the negative, i.e., the positive. The negative is in fact B&W. I am just curious as to why/how the "positive" shows colors. A couple of you have said it has something to do with the Epson Scanner software. I am pretty much a newbie, but I thought I would have heard of this before. I also didn't see anything on this phenomenon when I did an internet search. I actually like the effect in this case and of course can make it pure B&W if I want.

I'd still like to know the rationale for this.

The scanner software is trying to interpret your monochrome film as color, so it's probably bending curves around to change the color balance between the "shadows" and "highlights." If you clear all the adjustments, you'll probably have a simple monochrome image. Note "monochrome" doesn't mean black and white or grey, it means "single color." I'm guessing it choked up on the blue curve to get your bluish tones in the highlights while the shadows were bent into a brownish color.

The reason you didn't see anything online in your search is because probably only a small fraction of film users are bothering to scan b&w film in color mode, and from there most of them don't think too hard about the funky colors in the scan and merely isolate the green channel as it is usually the one with the best detail retention, and ditch the rest. Obviously as an "effect" you can use this as you see fit, but note that you can do the same thing with a greyscale image by duotoning or using color fill layers in Photoshop.

To reiterate, your HP5+ has NOT retained any color information. It just so happened the brownish shadows matched what you saw in real life. My T-Max negatives usually come out a little bluish in scan, but then I delete the color info.

[mitrajoon]

Coran, thanks for the detailed explanation. Exactly what I was looking for. I'll sleep better tonight