First foray into Zone - what happened?

[Scott --]

Agreed. Will look into that next, Steve.

[Donald Qualls]

Ok, FWIW, I went back and rescanned.

<snip>

Enough of this - I want prints!

Thanks for all the help, everyone. I will get this.

Based on that rescan, you've got some work to do on scanning, but your exposure and developing are as good as they need to be until you own a densitometer or have a specific problem with printing. It took me a couple years to get really confident with my scanning software, and I'm not looking forward to the thought of replacing this scanner at some future date and having to learn all over again.

Scanning is a skill, just like printing -- but it's a lot cheaper to learn.

[cyrus]

The suggestion was to use a textured object such as a sweater as the subject matter for your tests. The usual recommendation is to use a smooth surface. Textured surfaces usually contain multiple tones but for testing purposes you should be metering only a single tone. Also, while in theory the color shouldn't matter I've always thought it best to avoid using something that's very dark or very bright as the testing object.

All the zone books I've read use a textured item. Point being that you can see the textured highlights and textured shadow zones. If you use a smooth surface, you won't be able to distinguish a textured highlight from a blown-out highlight on your test strip photo, since it will all look plain white. The difference between Zone II and Zone III is that Zone III shows details (texture). The difference between Zone VIII and IX is that Zone VIII shows details (texture)

[steve simmons]

You are looking for a tone not a texture. As long as the lighting is flat and not from the side creating a lot of local contrast you will be fine. Don't let people make this too complicated for you


steve