In the previous post on this subject, I mentioned that scanning B&W negatives as positives could be a useful technique for high contrast negatives. Take a look at this example scanned as negative:

Yuck. Nasty, too bright highlights. I could work with it in PS, but I’d be struggling to bring those highlights down in any way that would look natural. Scanning as a negative positive gives me this, which at first glance, is worse:

A quick dose of levels and some wide radius USM, gives me this:

The highlights have been taken down from the painful range, but there’s still some detail in the skin tones. Looks better to me.

There’s something funny about ornamental grass in prairie state . . .

Anthony’s dead Blackberry. Camera work by the mourning owner himself.

Colin has recently been writing a lot about scanning. His post on RAW scanning reminded me of scanning negatives as positives, a technique I long ago abandoned, perhaps unfairly, after I got started down the path of tweaking the chemical process to suit the scanner. Back in ye olden days when people used to scan film, you would hear a lot about the benefits of scanning your B&W negatives as positives and then inverting the file in Photoshop using any one of a variety of techniques. By doing this you supposedly avoided the crappy algorithms and default curves of your scanning software. Generally, the technique results in a bright but flat scan, much like this:

Compare that, to a scan done as negative, with the scanner doing the inversion and curves:

As you can see, in scan done as a negative, the scanner software has pulled the data apart to give a full tonal range. In this case, it worked well. The negative was fairly flat, with a lot of detail in the shadows and highlights that were well within the scanner’s range. For a fairly neutral contrast photo like this, I’m not sure if there is any value in scanning as positive, but with a higher contrast image, scanning as a positive might give you a bit more headroom to work with. A bit like RAW scanning - or like shooting RAW in general - but without the need to buy vuescan or something similar. It’s a trick worth remembering.

the final version, from the scan done as a negative

BTW, HP5 @ 200 developed in Tmax 1+5 for 5 minutes at 68 degrees seems a promising combo.

Not sure what relationship stands between broken love receptors and Matthew 27:20.

Seriously? Who builds a pro camera (D3) with an eye relief of 18mm? Even their new pro-sumer (D300) camera only has 19.5mm of eye relief. Canon isn’t much better with 20mm for the new 1Dspq43 Mark IIIIXV, but at least the 40D gets 22mm. (Utterly Off-topic Obervation: Someone in the Canon product-naming department must have worked for the Royal Ordnance Ordinance Factory in a previous life.

I don’t want any of these pieces of junk for myself, but I feel for my oppressed, be-spectacled, digital shooting brothers and sisters. Unite! Unite! Stand up for rights!