Digi B&W Printing - Scan Negs or Contact Prints

[Scott Rosenberg]

good day,

i will soon be helping a friend of mine assemble a collection of prints culled from a much larger body of work. we are presently considering the best way to digitaly produce black and white prints from 4x5, 4x10, and 8x10 originals. ultimately the prints will be made from a digital file, so what we are considering is how to create a digital file that will yield the best print - scan the neg and print from that file or make a contact print, scan the contact print, and then print from that file.

scanning will be done using a microtek 1800F.

have any of you experimented with both of these methods? what conclusions did you draw?

thanks,
scott

[David A. Goldfarb]

I don't print B&W digitally, but whenever I've scanned B&W for web display, I've always gotten a better result by scanning the neg than by scanning a print.

[Ted Harris]

Scan the negatives. I can't imagine why you would want to generate another 'generation' into the reporductionprocess when you do not need to do so. Maybe there is a good reason though but I don't know what i t is.

[Paul Butzi]

scan the negatives.

[Bruce Watson]

Negatives.

[Veríssimo Dias]

Scan the negatives.

[Hans Berkhout]

Interesting. Why do some people scan prints and go from there, e.g. Ralph Gibson?

[Michael Graves]

"Why do some people scan prints and go from there, e.g. Ralph Gibson?"

Can't speak specifically for Ralph, but many extremely good printers work from a scanned print in order to get the results of their darkroom manipulations into the final reproduction. If lots of conventional darkroom work is part of your art; scan the print. Conversely, many photographers (if not most) find image manipulation easier in a program like Photoshop. In that case, definitely scan the negs.

Everybody here is saying scan the negs, yet I've noticed that most of the fine art photography books I own were produced from scanned prints and not negatives. Is there a reason for that?

[Henry Ambrose]

Absolutely, scan the negatives to get all they have to offer. But if you have a bunch of great prints and the reproduction size is not large you could scan the prints. This could even be a better choice if the prints are highly manipulated in the darkroom. If you scan the negative you'll have to replicate the all manipulations already done in the print.

Hans, I speculate that Gibson's "look" or desired end result depends on his wet darkroom work and might be hard to duplicate with scanning. I'm thinking of the graininess and that most of his pictures that come to mind don't depend so much on fine detail. So scanning a good sized wet print to then make duplicates might be a good way to go for him.

[Brian Ellis]

If the scan is being done just to put the image on a web site then a lot of people (including me) scan from the print since technical quality isn't critical with monitor display and scanning the print eliminates the need to do all the dodging, burning, and other editing over again. But if you're scanning for the purpose of making an excellent print, and if you have a large format negatives, then you should scan the negative, not the print.

I don't know for sure why Gibson scans the print rather than the negative. However, I know he uses a 35 mm camera so my guess is that it's because of the magnification factor involved in making an 8x10 or larger print from a 35mm negative. He probably gets better quality scanning from the print and eliminating or greatly reducing the mag factor. But if you have a large format negative, or probably even a medium format negative, you'll get a better print if the scan is from the negative rather than the print.