mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

380K
active users

Tony

Someone on RFF mentioned he was seeing a lot of film photographers posting black and white images straight from the scanner with no adjustment - meaning there were no real blacks to speak of, and everything was a mix of flat grey and white.

Now I can't unsee it and it's everywhere, so I'm writing this in the hope I can infect someone else.

@coldkennels
I've been noticing this for a while, I just didn't understand why so much B&W I see here looks so grey.

B&W *requires* treatment in post, because B&W is *never* a straightforward representation of reality; you have to get your hands on it and make it something. Not like color that way at all.

@bosak People who’ve never been in a darkroom seem to think that what’s on the negative is the finished product and don’t realise how much interpretation is still needed after that point. I think colour balancing is the equivalent for C41 stuff; luckily most scanning software is really good at colour adjustment, but every so often I see colour scans that definitely haven’t been adjusted after the scanner has spat a file out. It’s a real shame.

@coldkennels I started adjusting the black and white points on my scans after someone on here pointed it out to me.

@Gargron I never want to be That Guy and point it out myself, but it makes such a huge difference to the finished product. I guess maybe pointing it out *is* the kinder thing to do? I mean, I’ve seen your work lately and a lot of it is beautiful. We can’t learn if no one speaks up.

@coldkennels @Gargron I think it’s still possible to gently offer unsolicited advice. It just has a bad reputation because of how bluntly/rudely “reply guys” do it, but sometimes you don’t know what you need to hear — some of the best advice in my life was unsolicited

@logicalmoody @Gargron I find a lot of people find me blunt and/or rude regardless of how I talk or what I'm saying. I'm just British! And northern! That's the way we are!

(Although I did have a Zoomer once tell me she thought I was pissed off because I ended every message with a full stop. Make of that what you will.)

@Gargron @coldkennels Are you doing it before you scan or after? Best to do it before, in the scanning program, rather than after you scan in your editing program because you maximize the amount of information in the file that way.

@thereisnocat @coldkennels I don’t control the scanner, the lab does that.

@Gargron @coldkennels Okay. If you ever start scanning your own negatives, this is something to keep in mind.

@thereisnocat @Gargron I’ve heard the opposite: scan flat, adjust later.

@coldkennels @thereisnocat @Gargron I’m in the scan scan flat corner. That records the max pure detail available. With things like contrast, you can easily add contrast but you can’t take it out. I digitised my negs using a DSLR shooting RAW, so it doesn't make much difference. All the info is stored anyway.

@tapasinthesun @thereisnocat @Gargron Agreed. I like film/developer combos that need little-to-no-adjustment with a straight scan (Fomapan 100 and Rodinal, I'm looking at you), but for the vast majority of films, getting the scan flat as possible is much better than the alternative. Even with Fomapan I make sure to not crush the blacks when scanning; I can bring that up later.

@tapasinthesun @thereisnocat @Gargron ...and then I only really need a slight levels tweak to get the final image to where I want it. I tend to find I rarely bring the white point to pure white - I like cloudy skies to still be slightly grey instead of blown out.

This is just a quick adjustment - I might play around with darkening up the other side of the lake if this was in the darkroom and I was making a final print. But as a quick pass, I'm happy with this.

@coldkennels @thereisnocat @Gargron Pretty much the same here, except my favourite film is FP4.

I see you are a carp angler (I assume the bivvy and rods are yours). I used to be keen on that in the UK. I mostly fished Canterbuty AC waters. I still have my gear here; I live by a reservoir. I even got my fishing licence - that is a three day course with a test at the end!

@tapasinthesun @thereisnocat @Gargron actually, no; I’m bloody awful at fishing. My brother’s the angler. I go out with him from time to time, and while I always enjoy it when I do, I don’t have enough time to commit to it to actually become competent!

I’m always perplexed by people who say they’d be bored if they didn’t work. I could live ten lifetimes and still not have enough time to pursue all the things I enjoy.

@coldkennels That's kind of why I don't scan negatives at all. Only prints, if ever...

@coldkennels No editing? I wouldn't be able to cope with that lol. I love my deep contrasts, especially in BW.

@coldkennels Sadly, some people think that editing a negative scan is cheating. Well it's not. It's the equivalent of dark room dodging and burning, using contrast grades, pre-flashing, ... Even some of the Lightroom and Photoshop editing tools are named after darkroom techniques!

@tapasinthesun I’m weirdly happy that you mentioned pre-flashing. That’s one of my favourite darkroom techniques and it never seems to get mentioned anywhere. I’ve produced some incredible prints with that.

@coldkennels we have to use all the tools we have in the darkroom. There are not that many.

@tapasinthesun and yet so few people seem to know that exists! People seem to think split grade printing is the magic bullet and nothing else counts.