Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]My response to this is below the copied text--Herb Mark E Davison writes: > After you scan the print, you can expand the > dynamic range in photoshop to anything that you want. No, you cannot. You have only the range in the original print. Spreading it out over a larger range of intensities changes nothing. > There is certainly no reason to not use the > entire dynamic range of the monitor. Of course, but since the range of a print is so limited, it really doesn't matter. You don't have enough information to fill that range in the first place. > The fact that the optical density range of negatives > is greater than the reflectance density range of > prints is a bit of a red herring. It's painfully obvious when you compare scans of prints with scans directly from film. > The beautiful images on Ralph Gibson's website > (www.ralphgibson.com) are all scans from prints. They definitely look like scans from prints. - ---------------------------------------------------------------- I just want to restate some fundamentals. If my object were to produce images for computer viewing, I would have to agree with the above; a negative has a greater dynamic range than a print. But my object in photography is to produce prints to put in an album or hang on the wall (or to compete with if ever again I feel competitive). For some time, I just printed the occasional slide until the day that I realized the improvement in negative materials (around 1980) meant that I could get better results from negatives. Furthermore, the greater dynamic range of negatives compared to slides meant that if the scene's range exceeded what one could print, the decision on which end of the tonal scale to emphasize could be made at printing time rather than at snapping time. All this having been said, I see no reason for my purposes in producing a computer image that is any better than that of the print I want to share. Since I have pretty much standardized on 8 x 10 paper, that is what I would be scanning. Herb - -- Herbert Kanner kanner@acm.org 650-326-8204