Last week I asked about the value of getting scans done in BMP format, and it was suggested by some that I pass on that option. Well, I decided to see for myself how the whole experience would shake out, and since the lab received only a test roll, there wasn't much to be lost but a little time.
Well, assuming that the BMP files produce a good image quality, using them in PS is a PITA. Conversion from BMP to a PSD or TIFF file is annoying, and had I been using color instead of C-41 B&W for this test, I'd have had to fiddle with that as well. Just as the wise people on this list suggested ... however, I didn't think it would be so annoying. The lab's "high res" scans were awful. I asked for no corrections as i was playing around with different exposures of the same scene. Of course, they screwed that up pretty badly. In fact, an underexposed frame was actually brighter than the normally exposed frame taken afterwards. It looked more like the following overexposed frame. The day I made the photos was overcast, and there were a series of pics made of three people in an animated conversation standing in front of a light grey background of shingles, with lots of detail in them. Really hard to blow that exposure <LOL> Well, every one of those pics was scanned so the shingles were almost white, and the details blown out. The story was similar for every exposure on the roll ... Imagine photographing a black railroad tank car, exposing the shot so that the tank car falls into Zone III and Zone IV, and getting back a scan of the cars as middle grey. While I've not had this problem with the pro lab that I use, his mess leads to the question of how to reduce the possibility of this happening again, with any lab. I was thinking of including a calibration frame on the first frame ... maybe a grey card or a grey scale shot. Do you think this'll help? kind regards, Shel
