auto nothing - get in control!

[vicmortelmans]

I've been using my (first) filmscanner to scan some rolls of b&w that I developed myself. It's the first time that I see the results of that film, as no prints were made yet.

The first thing I did, was disabling the automatic exposure and automatic gamma in the film scanner software.

Amazing what you can learn by scanning auto-nothing! You can directly assess the quality of your photography and development techniques. Some things I spotted:

- on one film, I had to apply a gamma of 1.8 to all pictures because they were quite dark (talking about the positive images here).
=> underdevelopment (?)

- some individual pictures have too dark or too light values for skin tones
=> wrong metering because of very bright/dark background

- a picture of a door in a wall appears very flat because it has no highlights at all
=> obviously, because of the nature of the subject; increasing contrast to get some (artificial) highlights and shadows may make the image more appealing

When using auto exposure and auto gamma, I would have never thought about this, because each picture would have looked 'quite all right'.

Now I'm more satisfied, because about 75% of the pictures are good enough to be printed without further adjustments, and on the others I can choose my own correction method and more important: learn about why the image shows that way and probably anticipate in the future!

Do you disable auto-features as well?

Groeten,

Vic

 

[wtl]

judging by the photos you posted, i think you shouldd rethink using the auto everything...

 

[kaiyen]

Well, I presume that the photos in your gallery are _not_ the ones that you're messing with now, as you imply they are black & white with controllable development, but you have color in your gallery.

I leave Vuescan on auto levels, to be honest, as a starting point. I freely adjust when necessary, though Vuescan by default is not at all aggressive with levels so I have a histogram with more than enough room on either end. I found that I was needlessly doing levels all the time anyway. I instead focus my time on getting the right type of curve for the particular type of film/dev/time combo.

Having said that, it is very instructive to be able to do that when scanning. It's like looking at a contact sheet (not quite, but same kind of idea) printed at MTMB. You can learn a lot about film speed and development times this way.

allan

 

[ch1]

I prefer simply going "Auto" with my Nikon 5000D. I just want an uncompressed RAW (or, altertnatively TIFF) image which I can always "control" in PS afterwards.

 

[BJ Bignell]

I had (actually, I think I still have it) a very poor, absolute bottom-of-the-line Epson flatbed. The only way to get anything passable was with "auto" mode. If you fed it colour or b&w negs of good 'average' density, auto was OK.

If I did anything non-standard, such as push-processing in b&w or overexposure in C41 (for more shadow detail), I was better off eating my negs than trying to scan them. Auto mode, manual, multi-pass, whatever, it was usually all crap.

My point? The quality of the hardware and the quality of the software are not mutually exclusive. I think they both need to be good to get good results. And good familiarity with the various controls in both hardware and software will certainly yield the best results (technically speaking), just like in the analogue world.