Scanning a rather thick Kodak Plus-X

[Sid836]

Could you please advise me on how to scan a rather thick, but not bulletproof Kodak Plus-X negative? I had accidentally exposed it at EI 50 and developed in normally with D-23. There is plenty of detail everywhere, but the frames are somewhat dark. I have been used to developing my negatives with normal to relatively thin contrast so that they get scanned easily. Should I give this negative to a lab to scan it? I own an Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner.

 

[John Bragg]

There should be no problem scanning these negatives. You may even see a noticable improvement in shadow and mid tone details ! D23 is also forgiving of highlight details so you may have discovered a great recipe for good scanning negatives by accident !

 

[Sid836]

🙂 I will give it a try. The negatives haven't dried yet. Looking them under a magnifying glass they show a great amount of detail everywhere. Their dark look had scared me quite a bit. Trying to find out what went wrong, I had noticed that my lightmeter was set for 50 ASA from the previous run of a PanF + roll.
It has also been my first time trying the D-23. I had it mixed from scratch and I have been amazed of how clean the negative looks with it.

 

[sevo]

If you are past the scanner range, you might want to consider Farmer's reducer (the 2-bath proportional variety) or Kodak R15. Or hand off that film to someone who can scan it with a (professional) scanner with analogue exposure control.

 

[Highway 61]

Scan your negs as TIFF 16bits per channel color files as if you were scanning some color slides. Set the scanner software so that you get a linear histogram (no correction). Then export the files in PhotoShop. Invert to a positive. Re-frame so that there aren't any white borders. Look at every color channel and keep the most sharp. Suppress the color. Adjust the levels, the curves. Work differently on every area of the photo (as if you were under an enlarger in the darkroom) until you get something which you like. Flatten the file, and save as a Jpeg.

There is no magic ! 😉

 

[Sid836]

I will try that. If I do not get satisfactory results I will send it out for scanning as Sevo said.
I have tried reducers in the past, but I have messed up big time with them.

 

[Dwig]

I will try that. If I do not get satisfactory results I will send it out for scanning as Sevo said.
I have tried reducers in the past, but I have messed up big time with them.

If the images are very dense you may find that the scanner can't deliver good detail in the densest parts without excessive noise. You may find that borrowing the astrophotographer's method of stacking multiple exposures, multiple scans in this case, will substantially reduce the noise since noise is random and each scan would have a different noise pattern.

 

[Sid836]

Can this be done with the Epson V600 scanner? I have been using my D90 DSLR to do this but now I have sold it.

 

[Pherdinand]

you can stack by manually re-scanning it n times and using photoshop or other SW.
I suspect vuescan might allow scanning multiple times with the Epson- but i never used vuescan.
Of course the noise reduction will be only square root of n. You'll have to scan 16 times to get a 4x signal-to-noise improvement🙂

 

[Sid836]

It sounds time consuming but it is worth for those special frames that look promising. I will try with vuescan, the one I am using now.
Many thanks!