philipus
ʎɐpɹəʇɥƃı&
I'd be interested to see examples of dry vs wet mounting using any scanner, from flatbed Epsons to dedicated film scanners.
Care to share your results, experiences and techniques?
Cheers
Philip
Care to share your results, experiences and techniques?
Cheers
Philip
tsiklonaut
Well-known
Don't have any direct comparisons, but since I do both wet and dry I can tell the difference is there. I much prefer most of my work in the wet-mount. Yet for some speciefic work I prefer the dry mount, i.e. when I want enhanced grain or very actuated or "fuzzy" details when I intend to have some oldschool "romance" in my scans (I also play with aperture to optically control the grain-level structure of the scans - this feature is only available on drum scanners).
With wet-mounting you always lose some of the fine detail sharpness (the scans look slightly "softer" when viewing them 1:1), yet when you apply sharpening later it comes out much finer sharpness than with dry-mounted scan, since with sharpening mask you enchance the actual usable details (since wet-mount reduces grain) while with dry-mount you also sharpen the visible grain together with the usable details. Colors have little added "spark" plus there's slightly increased dmax range with the wet-mount method.
There are many small nuances with wet-mounting. Mostly good. The only bad side is it's a lot more work
But as said, since I run a drum scanner this affects wet-mount different than most common "flat" scanners - with a bit reduced "halo" effect (meaning less contrast in most cases) in comparison that's normally involved with the wet-mounting since with the drum scanner light goes through curved surface of the media, so all the nearby areas around the particular light beam bounces go to different directions (since it's curved), only the very narrow horizontal area that is perpendicular to the sensor head little "leak" the bounced light into the sensor. While the flat-surfaced scanners all the neighbouring area light bounces partly "leak" into the sensor, slightly reducing the overall contrast and fine-edges of the scan.
From what I understand when you have layers of transparent material with different densities the light "bounces" between those different layers, so with curved drum wet-mounting (light has to pass: drum-liquid-film-liquid-mylar - and it's two "bounce-surfaces" for each layer, thus there's a lot of "bounces" between them) that particular diffused light doesn't fall easily into the very narrow PMT-sensor head like with the flatbed scanners that scan wide array at the same time and the same applyes also to most dedicated film scanners, minus the Hassy/Imacon Flextight scanners that also "curves" media like the drum scanners, although the techology is very different.
However even with flat-surfaced scanners the wet-mounting can still be very beneficial - reduced grain, less dust and hidden scratches or other media defects.
With drum scanning the wet-mounting works like magic IMHO - it gives an "authority" to the scans so to speak. It's an optical effect in itself and you can also play with the apterture to "tune" the fine details for your taste.
To see some results you can check out this thread where most of the stuff is in wet-mount.
All IMHO of course,
Margus
With wet-mounting you always lose some of the fine detail sharpness (the scans look slightly "softer" when viewing them 1:1), yet when you apply sharpening later it comes out much finer sharpness than with dry-mounted scan, since with sharpening mask you enchance the actual usable details (since wet-mount reduces grain) while with dry-mount you also sharpen the visible grain together with the usable details. Colors have little added "spark" plus there's slightly increased dmax range with the wet-mount method.
There are many small nuances with wet-mounting. Mostly good. The only bad side is it's a lot more work
But as said, since I run a drum scanner this affects wet-mount different than most common "flat" scanners - with a bit reduced "halo" effect (meaning less contrast in most cases) in comparison that's normally involved with the wet-mounting since with the drum scanner light goes through curved surface of the media, so all the nearby areas around the particular light beam bounces go to different directions (since it's curved), only the very narrow horizontal area that is perpendicular to the sensor head little "leak" the bounced light into the sensor. While the flat-surfaced scanners all the neighbouring area light bounces partly "leak" into the sensor, slightly reducing the overall contrast and fine-edges of the scan.
From what I understand when you have layers of transparent material with different densities the light "bounces" between those different layers, so with curved drum wet-mounting (light has to pass: drum-liquid-film-liquid-mylar - and it's two "bounce-surfaces" for each layer, thus there's a lot of "bounces" between them) that particular diffused light doesn't fall easily into the very narrow PMT-sensor head like with the flatbed scanners that scan wide array at the same time and the same applyes also to most dedicated film scanners, minus the Hassy/Imacon Flextight scanners that also "curves" media like the drum scanners, although the techology is very different.
However even with flat-surfaced scanners the wet-mounting can still be very beneficial - reduced grain, less dust and hidden scratches or other media defects.
With drum scanning the wet-mounting works like magic IMHO - it gives an "authority" to the scans so to speak. It's an optical effect in itself and you can also play with the apterture to "tune" the fine details for your taste.
To see some results you can check out this thread where most of the stuff is in wet-mount.
All IMHO of course,
Margus