Looks Filtered Somehow?

JJK1975 · Jul 18, 2006

A few shots from my latest foray into the park came out looking like this, what I would call filtered. Not sure what else to call it.

It was a sunny day, but I was in fairly thick woods. I am using 400 ISO Kodak black and white loaded into my ebay-obtained Pentax K1000. I got this particular shot at 250 with the f-stop set at 8.

What can I do to not have this happen? Thanks in advance.

ksmattfish · Jul 18, 2006

It is low contrast. Is this how a print from the neg looks, or just the scan?

Scans usually need to have contrast boosted.

If a lab print from the neg looks like this it means they think you've underexposed it, and they've printed it for the highlights rather than the shadows. If they print it for black shadows, the whole image will get much darker.

If you are printing it yourself in the darkroom, you need to increase the contrast filters.

I did this by using levels in Adobe Photoshop, and just making the shadows darker. It does look under exposed to me. Probably the bright lights in the background fooled your camera meter.

JJK1975 · Jul 18, 2006

That's how the lab did it, and I posted from the cd they gave me. The print looks the same. One of these days (once we get the new house) I'll develop myself.

Yours looks much better, obviously.

How do I correct for this in the future?

ksmattfish · Jul 18, 2006

Unless the lab is just horrible you probably underexposed. Read up on how light meters work. Light meters are only good at one thing: telling you how to expose something so it turns out middle gray. You have to look at your subject/scene and decide if that's okay, or maybe not. In this photo I think the bright light coming through the trees in the background fooled the meter into thinking the scene was a lot brighter than it really was.

I opened your file in Adobe PS, and went to "levels". A histogram pops up. A histogram is a simple graph that shows the distribution of tones. When I open your file the edge of the histogram was way over in the mid to dark gray area. I moved it to black. Basically I told the software to make the darkest gray black, and try to stretch out the existing tonal range. I'm sure you can do this with any photo editing software, although it might not be quite the same as Adobe PS.