New Leica M7 and "fuzzy" negatives...

[Fred]

Very good point mad_boy, the processing of the film uses standard C41 chemistry. It's the printing thats the hard bit.

If the auto lab operator sets the machine to print the shots as a standard colour film the prints on the RA4 paper 'should' be black and white as this takes into account the orange base of the negative. Some CN films have a clear base which requires the auto lab to add filtration or as you state the black will be a muddy colour to it but the white will still be white.

 

[Doug]

Drawback is that you can not develop them yourself using the usual B&W development kits!!!!!! :bang:

Of course you CAN develop them yourself at home with a C41 processing chemical kit. The tricky part is maintaining 100°F and only 3.25 min developer time. Once you've worked that out, it's no harder or much different from traditional B&W processing.

 

[Joe Henry]

The photographs do look flat, and I'd say the negatives were underexposed, but it's hard to say for certain. Take a close look in Photoshop. Zoom in on a shadow area. Are there details? Do a Control/L (Levels). I suspect that there's not much black. Or white. Was it a low-contrast situation?
The scan setting seemed fine, but I scan my negativees as color negatives, then Desaturate in Photoshop.
Hope this helps.
Joe

 

[Doug]

The photographs do look flat.... Take a close look in Photoshop. Zoom in on a shadow area. Are there details? Do a Control/L (Levels). I suspect that there's not much black. Or white. Was it a low-contrast situation?

Hi Joe... this is what I was suggesting with my reworked sample in post #14... Seems to be one of my occasional invisible posts...

 

[StuartR]

Everyone is laying in with their own opinions so I guess I will add my own. My personal guess would be a mix of scanning technique and post processing. Even if you are not going to do much work in scanner, it makes sense to set the black and white points just outside the edges of the histogram. By doing so you ensure that the scanner is not wasting dynamic range on areas where there is no information. Then when you are in photoshop, do levels and don't be afraid to really move around the grey point a lot if it makes the photo look better. Negative film gives you a great deal of tonal range, more than can be displayed well on screen, so don't be afraid to increase the contrast a bit by pushing the black and white points a little closer together.

In any case, I think that these negs don't look as nice as your bronica stuff because a flatbed can do a much better job with medium format negs than it can with 35mm. That said, with a bit more post processing work they should be ok. It has been my experience that no scanner I have used short of the Imacon 646 really gets scans right without post processing. The Imacon is the only one where you can just scan and be done with it. Everything else, including the Minolta Scan Multi Pro (a 3000 dollar scanner) requires a good deal of post processing.


OH, and PS to Shutterflower: All M's with built in meters meter through the lens. The TTL in the M6 TTL is for flash metering. Even the Leica CL and CLE meter through the lens...the only ones that don't are the M2, M3, and M4's, because they have a hotshoe meter.

 

[richard_l]

But, maybe those M7s don't meter through the lens? I didn't think any of the Leica's did, but that is why we are all here isn't it? To learn! At least 50% learning and 50% pleasure.

Every Leica rangefinder which has a built-in meter is TTL. The models would be: CL, M5, M6, M6TTL, M7, MP.

 

[rayfoxlee]

The problem may well be in the development.

I have a roll of BW400CN here and on the box it reads
"Treatment C-41"; which is the standard developing done in labs for colour.

If I am well informed, these films are especially developed for the colour development porcess in labs, such that people who do not do their own development can have them developed (hardly any labs do B&W at the moment).
The neg is not Black and white but some sepia colour (after proper development). It will still give good B&W prints though.

Drawback is that you can not develop them yourself using the usual B&W development kits!!!!!! :bang:

As sugested before, get some old-fashioned film, and all should be well.

Mad_boy

Sorry to correct you, Mad-Boy, but you can develop C-41 B&W film in conventional developer. Try ID11/D76 at 20 degrees C, diluted 1:1. This came from one of the technical guys at Ilford when I said that developing XP2 was a bit of a pain. It works! 😛

 

[LazyHammock]

It looks as though the material? you were shooting is white or at least very light in color. The meter will expose this as 18% grey. I suspect if you had opened up a stop or two you would have has better exposed negatives. The second picture has a lot of the light foreground and some sky, this again would be underexposed by the meter if you didn't compensate by slowing the shutter or opening the aperture.

 

[rayfoxlee]

There are some great replies here, photon-hunter. I think you are pushing your luck a bit to expect a 35mm to be as good as a 6x4.5 MF neg. Thats' my experience, anyway, as I have a Fuji GS645 (amazingly sharp) and 35mm. I recently bought an M2 with a 50mm cron and would like to get my 35mm technique up to a point where the results are a pretty close second. Still much to do!!

You obviously enjoy the tussle with the whole business of using film for B&W! My own thoughts on your 'journey' would be to get yourself a good spotmeter (pentax or minolta). In-camera average metering systems are just not calibrated to make the best of B&W film. Take a reading of the darkest area of your picture in which you wish to see some detail and then stop down by a couple of stops. The meter will have a button that will give you the value for a shadow reading, so you won't have to make the calculation.

Providing you have your processing right (I thought that the problem could be exhausted developer, until I saw that a commercial lab did the job - they certainly shouln't get that one wrong!!) and you scan OK, any other problems are likely to be down to exposure. Sharpness is difficult to judge on-screen, but poor exposure won't help.

Good luck with the M7. Perseverence is an essential ingredient in the 35mm chemistry!!

 

[Nikon Bob]

Try ID11/D76 at 20 degrees C, diluted 1:1. This came from one of the technical guys at Ilford when I said that developing XP2 was a bit of a pain. It works! 😛

Can you explain ID 11/D76 at 20 degrees C, diluted 1:1 in long form for someone like myself who has not done any home developing? Thanks.

Bob

 

[jlw]

I don't think there's anything wrong with your technique, your exposure, or your negatives, except that maybe the black and white points of your scans aren't set correctly.

I don't think it's best to be a purist about "scanning directly out of the negative without any fiddling in scanner software." Left to itself, the scanner software does its own fiddling, which will only be appropriate for "average" images. It's better to set the scanner software so it captures the full range of tones in YOUR images, then use Photoshop to distribute those tones to your liking.

I suspect that if you went back and rescanned the negatives, positioning the black and white points on the scanned-image histogram so that they included your negatives' range of tones and no more, that you'd get starting-point scans that would look much better and be much more correctible in Photoshop.

In concept, this is not much different from shooting in raw mode with a DSLR: yes, you can do a lot of adjusting after the fact, but if your original capture is wildly over- or under-exposed, you won't be able to adjust it back to optimum quality. When scanning, your scan is your capture, so you want to make sure your initial settings are reasonably correct.

 

[StuartR]

Bob ID11 and D76 are the Ilford and Kodak versions of essentially the same developing formula. Diluted 1:1 means you use 1 part developer stock solution to 1 part water.

But all this said, I have also heard that you can developed C41 films in traditional chemicals, but the results are not that great. Also, what's the point? If you are going to develop yourself you might as well use real silver negatives as they will last forever and are much easier to print (in the darkroom anyway). As for grain, how does Delta 400 compare to XP2, I imagine that they are not that different.

 

[JohnL]

I understand the film was metered at its rated ISO of 400. You used the M7 on-board meter which is TTL. Thus it will compensate for the yellow filter. Unless the meter is wonky you should have reasonably good exposure.
The film was processed commercially, so let's assume it was done right. It is rather rare for this to go badly wrong, but it can happen.
You have scanned the negs on a flatbed scanner. This may be a source of the problem. They are C41 process negs, so they should be scanned as colour negative, I think. I could be wrong, I've never used this sort of BW film. One way to tell might be to look at the negs on a light table. Do the negs look flat, or do they have a good range of contrast? If they were regular BW negs and they did not contain some good blacks (highlights) and whites (deep shadows), then they'd likely be underexposed. Color negative (and -- I am guessing here -- BW C41 negs) do not need to have really deep blacks even when properly exposed and processed. If the negs don't have deep blacks, try setting your scanner to colour neg, and then convert the result to monochrome in post. Hope this helps.
As jlw mentioned, you may need to adjust the black and white points, or even play with the contrast curve, after scanning. With BW C41 negs I imagine you can just desaturate to convert to monochrome. If they were color negs you could benefit from playing with the balance between the channels too.

 

[richard_l]

There are a lot of things which could have gone wrong. Even the exposure system of the M7 is not above suspicion. Things can get out of whack, even with new Leicas.

 

[Fred]

StuartR "As for grain, how does Delta 400 compare to XP2, I imagine that they are not that different."

Stuart, an interesting question. Delta should produce a sharper result when enlarged (works well in TMAX) but will have visable grain at 12" x 16" but will still be very sharp. With XP2 the grain is disolved in the bleach fix of the C41 process and all that remainf is the dye activated during development so will have a smoother tonal range similar to colour negative film (good for flattering portraits of girls) but it would lack that 'bite' and definition of Delta.

On a small enlargment of say 6" x 4" it would be a contrast shootout only. XP2 has a lower contrast which should make it better for shadow detail.

 

[Nikon Bob]

StuartR

Thanks, the ID 11 threw me as I was aware D76 was a Kodak developer. You may have a point about developing silver based film if you are going to bother with developing. I scan and print on an inkjet ( I know, I should wash my mouth out for saying that) so how it prints in a darkroom setting means little to me now, but that could change you never know. Never had good results with real B&W as I have it done at the local pro lab and prefer the C41 stuff.

Bob

 

[Fred]

Bob, what scanner are you using?

I've always had trouble getting decent results from scanning traditional B&W (non C41) film with my old Coolscan IV and tend to scan from wet print on a flat bed.

Given its getting harder to source chemistry and paper easilly I'll be going down the scan route at some point (before RFF book 2). Also for trannies it gets beat. This is probably operator error so feel free to think me as stupid in this respect, advice welcome 🙂

 

[StuartR]

Bob -- if all you are doing is scanning it is less of a problem. But for printing in the darkroom, c41 films can be a bit of a hassle. XP2 is not so bad, but the Kodak films are very difficult because they still have the same orange colored base as the safelight... In general they require much longer enlarger times and need to be printed at high contrast settings. The church photo in my avatar is a BW400CN negative and to print it in the darkroom I need to do the contrast setting at around 4 to 4.5 and enlargement times on bergger paper generally tops 40 seconds (a normal time is 6-15 seconds).

 

[Doug]

I agree with Stuart; the orange mask typical of all color and most B&W C41 films is a major pain in the conventional darkroom. They're intended for better printing on color paper at the lab. This is quite a compromise for B&W, as they often print with dull low contrast and it's hard for the lab to avoid some kind of over-all color tint. I usually tell them that if they cannot avoid a little tint, let it look like selenium toning. 🙂

Scaning is the best answer, I think, with the masked films.

But there is no orange mask in Ilford XP2, nor Fuji Neopan 400CN, nor Kodak's now-discontinued T400CN, though this latter does have a faint pinkish base tint that might just serve to boost contrast a little with multi-contrast darkroom papers. Haven't tried printing that, but it's easy to get nice conventional prints with Ilford's XP (and Fuji's should be the same).

 

[StuartR]

Neopan 400 is a regular B&W film as far as I know...at least 400 Presto is, as I used it in Japan...