Alpha
Troll Extraordinaire
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2005
- Messages
- 5,451
- Reaction score
- 41
- Location
- San Francisco
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos NOT OK to edit
Many of us who shoot film and do not have easy access to professional quality scanning equipment often butt heads with a significant hurdle: our scanners. Nearly all flatbed scanners are notoriously bad at recording fine shadow, and worse highlight detail, especially in film scans (negative and positive). Even expensive CCD negative scanners with LED back-lighting can leave some to be desired. I have many a chrome from which even a Nikon SuperCoolScan 9000 on it's highest quality settings has difficulty recording fine highlight detail, yet print wonderfully to Ilfochrome. This represents a significant hurdle to producing high quality digitized work, particularly when one considers the expensive and cumbersome alternative: the drum-scan.
So what's a film-shooter to do? You could make a print, or an internegative or interpositive enlargement that underexposes the highlights and then scan that. But this is a tedious and expensive proposition.
I propose a radical alternative for shots that are specifically taken for digital presentation, when time and money are of the essence: shoot to scan with color negative film. Underexpose your highlights in order to compensate for the scanner's inability to record them well, and correct in post.
So what's a film-shooter to do? You could make a print, or an internegative or interpositive enlargement that underexposes the highlights and then scan that. But this is a tedious and expensive proposition.
I propose a radical alternative for shots that are specifically taken for digital presentation, when time and money are of the essence: shoot to scan with color negative film. Underexpose your highlights in order to compensate for the scanner's inability to record them well, and correct in post.