On May 14, 2012, at 9:07 AM, Kenton Brede wrote: > I'm just getting started with film. One of the things I've read is, > unlike digital, it's better to expose for shadow detail.
Like most rules, this is, for the most part, bullshit. It all depends on what part of the image is important. With film or digital, if highlights are important, you want to make sure they fall within a couple of stops of your incident meter of gray-card light reading -- or zone 7. If shadows are critical, they should be around zone 3, perhaps zone 2 if very dark. Again, within a couple of stops of the median. With digital, it depends a lot on the capability of the camera. With the K-5, I can expose for highlights and pull up shadow if necessary. If i do that with the K-7, I end up with a noisy mess of an image. > I've read that a lot of ail can be pulled back from the overexposed areas on > film. It's true that burning-in an optical print and/or altering time in the soup can restore much more highlight detail than any scanning software I've ever tried. > > My question is, can that detail be pulled back from a digital scan of > a negative, or can that only be done via wet print process in a > darkroom? I have never worked extensively with a high-end scanner, like the latest Nikon film scanners or an Imacon. But I think scanning software in general is a generation or two behind the latest digital technology, so pulling detail from a negative on a scan is iffy at best. Using Vuescan on my flatbed (admittedly a very crude combination), I find that each step in the high and low curves or black point and white point, yields an almost unnoticeable difference, then one click more and the image falls off the cliff. It's a little worse than crude. The best I can do is get a scan that's somewhat close and fix it in PhotoShop. (With negs, Vuescan will save as DNG, so I can do a double salvage routine, first in ACR, then in PhotoShop.) I suspect there is much better software available for the high-end scanners, but I would think it's still a generation away from digital, and it will never catch up now that it's become somewhat obsolete. > Another way to state this, should film be exposed in > different ways depending on how it will be post processed, digitally > or analog? Get a good average exposure using an incident meter or gray card and (as we used to say in the commercial production biz), fix it in post. Paul > Thanks, > > -- > Kent Brede > http://kentonbrede.com/ > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
