Are my blacks, black? And my whites, white?

[ElectroWNED]

I shot these from the same roll of Ilford XP2, mostly shot at 250 ISO, and somewhere around f8 or 5.6.

When you look at these scans, do you think "yep, that's black & white," or just a bunch of gray... 😱

 

[Al Kaplan]

Looks just fine on my monitor.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Tonality looks nice to me. Most people who scan film produce files with way too little contrast, because raw scans of negative film always look flat (scanners are made for the wider density range of slide film). You have to increase contrast in Photoshop, and most don't go far enough in my opinion of most of the work I see in the galleries here. You don't need to have anything in the image that is pure white or pure black....many scenes won't have anything that dark or light, but you need enough midtone contrast to make the image have some life.

 

[ElectroWNED]

Okay, so far, so good.

I had some doubts because of what I had to do to these images to get them where they are.

Walmart scans to CD, contrast +30 in CS3, then convert to "Black and White."

Here is a scan directly from the disc:

I feel like I'm still shooting digital, what with all the photoshop.

I guess I won't be satisfied until I learn how to develop and print HP5 myself, starting in January.

 

[35mmdelux]

looks good to me.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Okay, so far, so good.

I had some doubts because of what I had to do to these images to get them where they are.

Walmart scans to CD, contrast +30 in CS3, then convert to "Black and White."

Here is a scan directly from the disc:

I feel like I'm still shooting digital, what with all the photoshop.

I guess I won't be satisfied until I learn how to develop and print HP5 myself, starting in January.

What kind of film are the scans from? Color negs? C-41 black and white film? If its color film, my experience is that color images lose contrast when converted to BW, so that could account for your flat images before you photoshopped them.

 

[ElectroWNED]

C41 Ilford XP2

 

[Melvin]

If you look through "the Print" by Ansel Adams very few of the example images contain pure black or white.

 

[ElectroWNED]

alright, I guess I am just overly critical of my own images.