Today’s post is kind of a follow-up on yesterday’s post about how I am now digitizing my film and why I’m so enamored that I can finally get the results that I consider both worthy of presentation on the web and suitable for printing.
First, I’ll present what came back from the lab with this particular frame:
I haven’t even bothered trying to process it. It’s got that overly sharp, grainy look that I always seem to get with lab scans, no matter which lab I use. Additionally, both the highlights and the shadows are burnt out to the point that I wouldn’t be able to get much, if any kind of useful data if I tried to recover them.
On the other hand, here’s what I was able to come up with yesterday with the method I described:
A lonely windmill is silhouetted against a dramatic sky in rural El Paso County, Colorado in July of 2017.
YashicaMat LM, Kodak Tri-X 400
I still need to work out the dodges and burns a little bit more but there’s detail anywhere I want it and the grain is nowhere near as pronounced. Indeed, with the bracketing process that I mentioned yesterday, I could conceivably expand the tonal range further by combining the best parts of each scan into an HDR image.
I think the frustrating part for me is the inconsistency of the lab scans. There are other frames on this exact same roll, from the exact same machine, using the exact same scan technician that are much, much better. This was my favorite image from this particular roll, though. So it was kind of a bummer when the scan came back so rough.
Again, major kudos to Nate for Negative Lab Pro for giving me a product that finally allows me the kind of control and consistency I’ve been craving for my film images.
2 Comments
MAN I wish that plugin were available for Photoshop. That’s where I do all of my work. I barely ever even start Lightroom.
I was kind of curious why that was the case since one would think that plugins would work across the various Adobe platforms. I searched the NLP forum and found a thread that discusses why the program doesn’t exist for Photoshop. Interestingly, it sounds like while Lightroom plugins work non-destructively, Photoshop plugins do not work the same way. PS plugins do not access RAW data and are destructive editors. Kind of odd that Adobe would build their platforms so differently but there are a lot of decisions Adobe makes that I don’t understand…