Originally Posted by
urs0polar
One of the experts who knows better than I please chime in, but here's my suggestion:
I opened this in photoshop; the histogram is showing that the entire dynamic range is in the lower half of the image. A simple levels adjustment makes a huge difference. There's actually quite a bit of contrast already there.
Looking at the histogram in the original image, it looks to me like you may have a suboptimal scan. I don't know what scanning software you are using, but you want to look at the histogram in the preview and try to get the settings right so that the image data fills up almost the entire horizontal width of the histogram (as a reference to what I'm talking about, your original image data only fills the left half). I try to set the software so that the darkest point in the final positive image (usually the unexposed border of the frame) is 0 and let the high values (which are actually the densest regions of the negative) fall where they may (Vuescan makes it easy to do this; Vuescan is what I use and know how to operate). Thus, since you are setting the darkest part to the film base density, you aren't losing any data in the shadows should you decide to bump them up later. For instance, your daughter's hair above her left eye, in which all detail is lost because it was probably underexposed when scanned. If the detail wasn't there in the first place due to exposure, then there's no way to get it back, but B&W film has tons of dynamic range, and I would hope that it's there on the negative. To help out with just getting a good histogram, I turn off or flatten all curves and so forth so that I get a "flat" scan. This flat scan may look boring, flat, or not how you ultimately want it, but don't worry as you will be able to fix the rest in Photoshop, and Photoshop is a much better tool than any scanning software once you have a good scan to work with (and even sometimes when you don't).
What this procedure does is allow the scanner to capture as much dynamic range as possible into a flat scan.
Once you have the flat scan achieved, open it in Photoshop (or other image editing app), and do a levels adjustment, and bring the right-side slider all the way down to where the right side of the image data is in the histogram, to taste (on a mac, hold down the option key to see more readily where the highlights in the image start to blow out; I don't know what the key-combination is in Photoshop on Windows). Do the same for the darks with the left-side slider (you probably won't need much darks adjustment as this scan procedure should have helped with that already).
Now, you are ready to adjust the image further: add contrast, try to bump up the shadows with a curve, balance the color (if in color), etc etc. I wouldn't mess with the "brightness" adjustments (as you said in another post) until this phase, though if you got a good flat scan and a good levels adjustment in Photoshop, you shouldn't need to. Usually "exposure", curves, etc are a little more subtle and easier to control at this stage.
Hope this helps.
And by the way... great shot!
. I think so!
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