Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Peter Klein writes: > Hear ye, hear ye, all ye good folks who scan > black and white *film*. Do you use "real" B&W > or chromagenic film? I scan mostly "real" B&W films, mainly because I like the way they respond to light. Also, C-41 black-and-white films are routinely ruined by the fact that most labs cannot seem to develop C-41 without covering every image with scratches. It takes hours to remove scratches in Photoshop, and you still don't get a completely clean image, and this is such a serious problem that it negates any advantage of C-41 B&W. There's not much point in getting the fine grain of an XP2 or Portra B&W if scratches the size of an undersea telephone cable are crossing the image in every direction. > I'm particularly interested in people who use > film scanners and real black-and-white. I scan mostly Tri-X, Technical Pan, and T-Max. > Have you had problems with grain aliasing? I've never paid any attention. Grain is something that interferes with the image for me. I tolerate it in Tri-X because Tri-X responds so nicely to light overall, but if it were not there at all, that would be fine with me. The fact that the grain is large enough to be visible is bad enough; whether it is "aliased" or not doesn't change anything for me. > If so, what scanner do you use, what's its > resolution, and what do you do about the aliasing? LS-2000, 2700 dpi, and I don't do anything about the aliasing (I don't even know if it is really there). > Defocus? Scan at lower resolution? Limit the > size of your prints? If I don't want the grain, I shoot a film that doesn't have visible grain. Technical Pan is an obvious choice, although it is slow. Usually Tri-X grain is not too obtrusive in full-frame images, so I don't mind, but if I need to see fine details, or crop and enlarge, something else is needed.