Is dust more visible on scans?

[ChrisP]

Alright,
I haven't used an actual darkroom in a while. I want to make one eventually but limitted space at the moment so I'm curious more than anything. When I scan negatives I don't think I've ever had a negative without at least one dust spot I didn't have to touch up. So my question. Does this happen with wet printing? Am i doing something wrong (I don't think so because digital ICE exists). If it doesn't happen during wet printing than why not?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[thegman]

I don't wet print, but I understand from those writing here that dust is less of a problem with printing than with scanning. Dust is a fact of life with scanning, if you're only getting one or two spots per scan, you're doing OK in my opinion.

 

[Stelios]

From my experience dust is not that much of an issue in wet printing as it is in scanning. It still is but not in the amount it is when I scan. Same for grain.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Very short answer(s): dust was/is a problem in the darkroom, and it's a problem when scanning. Due to physics and things not being exactly the same, the problems are different in both "scenarios".

In the "completely analog" world, you have the condenser vs. diffuser (and of course, the intellectual "who cares!"); the idea of the diffuser is to circumvent the dust issue on negatives. Take a quick look at a thread over at PNut: http://photo.net/black-and-white-photo-printing-finishing-forum/00V1Fw

In the "hybrid" world, you have film scanners which have either direct LED light(s) and/or diffusers also (and of course, the intellectual "who cares!"). Then there's so-called ICE, which works only with C-41 (dye) films, and it helps to filter out the bothersome dust issue.

Also, in wet printing, people (the nonintellectual ones who never said "who cares!") would retouch (OMG!) the prints with special pens in order to either "remove" or "mask" evident crud that would show during different stages of the process (dust/hair on negatives, glass, chemicals, paper, etc.)

With "traditional" silver (i.e. B&W) films + non- or pseudo-professional scanners, expect to do a lot of retouching. A lot. Although ignorance is bliss, and if you simply say "who cares!" you'll save yourself a lot of trouble 😀

 

[Photon42]

I'm not an expert in this but I believe the light source type (direct vs indirect light) is certainly one determinant. When I used to print negatives the conventional way, the prints always suffered from something - be it some dust, flatness (no glass), newton rings (glass), a fine scratch ... It is not that I am sloppy with the process. It is just very difficult to get everything right and perfect.

I greatly enjoy the scanner as my lightroom enlarger along with the Notebook. It gives me the opportunity to do things I would not do otherwise due to time restrictions and allows for almost unlimited post processing. The only things I do usually are however contrast adjustments, retouche and BW conversion at times.

Cheers
Ivo

 

[ZeissFan]

Briefly, I compare scanning to using a condenser enlarger, which tends to cause dust to be more visible than when using a diffuser head.

If you scan, you're going to be cleaning up dust spots.

 

[Sparrow]

... xp2 and IR cleaning is one way to keep the workload down

 

[Stelios]

I might add here that I've been mainly using diffuser enlargers. In condensers the dust problem was more noticeable but nowhere near a scan.

 

[Stuart John]

One thing to remember is that when we scan we tend to view things at 100% in photoshop to do a spotting this makes tiny specks, dust and such really visible but with tradition darkroom those small specks may have been too small in the actual print.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

That is very true: hardly anybody (during my "wet darkroom" days) would actually use a loupe to look at the grain when focusing the enlarger; I almost always did. While the grain looks "different", the grain is there. I remember not liking TMax at first precisely because of this (and because it was very fidgety with the fixer I used).

Oh what creatures we be.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

... xp2 and IR cleaning is one way to keep the workload down

Yes, which is why I'm a little frustrated that XP2 is hard to find here in Paris. Kodak CN (or BN or whatever their revolving-door ADHD marketing big wigs call it now) is very very good for scanning, but I just don't like that orange mask; I need to scan it as "color" and then convert to greyscale, otherwise the tones don't come out like they should. It takes a lot of hard disk space and CPU time which when you have a life it's not a very pleasant thing.