Scanning wrong, or developing wrong? A tale of two rolls

[Takkun]

Just a thought, but the main difference between the two rolls is the scanner itself. Could the light source be going?

I didn't get along with silverfast.

Michael

That's my fear, especially since the shadows are incredibly murky and grainy, But I don't know. I'll go back and re-scan some known-good negatives when I get the chance, and try the bad ones with the Epson next time I'm in the lab.

I guess if worse comes to worse and my DiMAGE is dead, I've got access to a couple Coolscans at work.

 

[Takkun]

Another update: I tried outputting as a raw DNG.


Much better, much more flexibility. Still a flat negative and horrific grain, but it doesn't look like complete crap. Looks like I've got a lot of my past work to re-scan…


So, another question, since I'm full of em--how does one know when the scanner lamp is going out?

 

[Highway 61]

There has been lots of discussions everywhere about how to scan 35mm B&W negatives already. For a dozen years or so. Nobody will re-invent hot tap water onwards from now.

So :

- with a Minolta scanner, scan your neg in 16bits TIFF (or DNG) as if it was a color slide (sRGB mode). Why ? We all don't know but contraringly to what a Coolscan does, the Minolta scanners produces grayscale mode files which are noticeably poorer as for their further headroom in PhotoShop than their sRGB files produced out of the same photo (it might be because ot the Minolta lamp versus the Nikon LEDs)
- do not use the scanner software to post-process : set Vuescan so that the curve is a straight diagonal
- export the file in PhotoShop as is
- reframe so that you don't have anything else than the photo (you just can't adjust the levels and curves properly if you have a huge black margin all around your image)
- invert (negative to positive)
- post-process the way it should be done (for this : tons of infos around).

What Chris Crawford explains and displays in his tutorials is excellent (but for the 16bits gray or 16bits sRGB thing which, again, is an issue with some Minolta scanners only). Those from Markus Hartel are worth a visit too.

Here you go :

http://www.markushartel.com/blog/category/learn-from-markus/page/2

Scroll down the page.

I have a Minolta DualScan II scanner and using the tips I wrote above I can see no difference in what it produces (albeit for the lesser resolution) if compared to the Coolscan V I have now sold to a friend.

Bottom line : the neg you display above looks quite overexposed - this doesn't help.

Below, a recent shot, properly exposed on T-Max 100 and routinely developed in D76 1+1.

How the neg comes out the Dual Scan II as a color slide file :

What the neg looks like once inverted in PhotoShop :

The final print :

Scanning takes time, and the post processing step must be carefully gone through with a capable imaging software, which won't destroy the data the scanner captured off the film.

[Classic Nikon S3 with vintage Carl Zeiss Biogon 21/4.5 - During a terrific bike ride at 1,350m above the sea level - August 2014]