Film shots from Newcastle

Patti · December 30, 2009

I picked up my film today. Here are a few candid shots from pubs and Grainger Market. C&C gratefully accepted.

I was trying to get an overall feel of a busy pub with multiple conversations going but I wasn't able to get a good enough perspective for any patrons to really stand out. It's just a hodge podge with not focus

and busted

rutt · December 30, 2009

These two are very nice. Is there some reason you don't want better blacks? It will add a lot of drama and help with the noise.

Patti · December 30, 2009

Thanks rutt. I'm still not getting enough contrast from the film and I'm having to PP it in LR before posting. Even so, I haven't mastered getting a true black.

rutt · December 30, 2009

Patti wrote:

Thanks rutt. I'm still not getting enough contrast from the film and I'm having to PP it in LR before posting. Even so, I haven't mastered getting a true black.

It's very easy in Photoshop. I'm sure you can also do it in LR, but I don't use it very much (too hard for me.)

Patti · December 30, 2009

Here's another go but I still find I'm getting some tint.

michswiss · December 31, 2009

The composition on all of them is very nice. But, I'm curious why you're having difficulties getting good blacks with film. Do you think it's in the processing or the scanning or are the prints coming out the same? I haven't played with film for ages.

Patti · December 31, 2009

michswiss wrote:

The composition on all of them is very nice. But, I'm curious why you're having difficulties getting good blacks with film. Do you think it's in the processing or the scanning or are the prints coming out the same? I haven't played with film for ages.

I'm not sure. I just started trying film in Sept. (an expensive experiment). I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing, the processing or what. The first photo of the crowded pub is untouched. Here are a couple before adjustment

Gary752 · December 31, 2009

Patti...From the looks of the last two photos you posted, it looks like the images were very dark, and the lab you used lightened them up when printing. That's why they look very grainy. Next time you have film processed, tell the lab that you want the photos untouched. The average person doesn't care what a photo looks like, as long as they have a print of a moment that might be important to them, thus the labs will lighten up the dark ones, and darken the over exposed ones.

GaryB

rutt · December 31, 2009

Since Light Room doesn't seem to be going away for reasons I can't really fathom, I dove in and figured out how to use it to get the blacks you want in these and also how to get rid of the tint. Someone who actually uses and likes Light Room might give better advice. Someone (like B.D. or Tina) who does more film scanning might be able to help you get a better starting image.

Here is the pub couple after a tweak in LR:

[imgr]http://www.ruttpix.com/photos/753776654_g9zeN-X2.jpg[/imgr]
And here is what I figured out about using LR to improve these images

First you have to click the "Develop" tab in the upper right. This might be very obvious, but I thought I'd list everything I figured out.
Take the image to grayscale to get rid of any tint. There might be a better way, but this hits the problem over the head with a big hammer.
This thing is a histogram. It shows how much of the image falls into each shade of gray. It has shades from darker to lighter along the horizontal axis and amount of the particular shade along the vertical axis. You'll see that with your original iamges, it shows that there are no very dark grays. Instead there is a big mountain in the histogram a little to the right of the leftmost edge. This means that the darkest point of the image isn't really black but a lighter shade of gray. Real black lives in the leftmost edge and real white lives on the rightmost edge. So we want to fix the histogram so it will distribute the shades all the way to the left.
The easiest way to do this is with the "Black" slider. Pull it to the right and it will distribute the histogram further to the left. Do this enough and you'll pull it all the way over to the left edge and you will have some real blacks. THe histogram will show it and you'll also be able to see it the image. Don't just trust your eyes here. Use the histogram as well so you know you have real blacks. Your eyes can fool you.
The problem with using the easiest method is that it can plug the shadows, meaning that you will lose some of the details in the darkest parts of the image. You can do better by using the tone curve which gives you more precise control over just which shades get how much darker. The curve represents input/output darkness. Originally it's a straight line, meaning that the image is unchanged. Pulling a point on the curve down will make parts of the iamge that were originally that shade darker. Pulling it up will make them lighter.
The easiest way to get started with the tone curve is to click on this little button to get into a mode which lets you see where a point on the image is on the curve. A good start is to find a point on the image which you think should be black, click on it and with the mouse button down, move the mouse downward to pull a point in the curve to the bottom axis. After you do this, you can play with the curve with the mouse to try to make it steeper as it rises to the right and thus get more contrast in the deep shadows. This takes practice.

Hope that helps.

Patti · January 2, 2010

Thanks rutt. I'm fairly familiar with LR2 since I use it almost exclusively. The last fine points about using the mouse in the curves panel is new for me so thanks very much. I've often been frustrated by the loss of shadow detail when playing with B&W conversion in LR2.

Thanks so much.

michswiss · January 2, 2010

rutt wrote:

Since Light Room doesn't seem to be going away for reasons I can't really fathom, I dove in and figured out how to use it to get the blacks you want in these and also how to get rid of the tint. Someone who actually uses and likes Light Room might give better advice. Someone (like B.D. or Tina) who does more film scanning might be able to help you get a better starting image.

Not to derail, but why the admonition about LR? I use Aperture but Lightroom is equivalent and I find the image manipulation tools more than sufficient for all but the exceptional cases. Plus the DAM features are extremely useful.

I've opted to save the ~$1,500 for CS4 until I have a clear requirement or project for that particular piece of software.

michswiss · January 2, 2010

Patti wrote:

I'm not sure. I just started trying film in Sept. (an expensive experiment). I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing, the processing or what. The first photo of the crowded pub is untouched. Here are a couple before adjustment

Patti, I've been itching to try film again and as luck would have it my Sis-in-law has an old Canon T70 with a 50/1.8 she's going to let me have. Now to get a few rolls of high-ISO, B&W, grainy film and go out and shoot.

Patti · January 2, 2010

michswiss wrote:

Patti, I've been itching to try film again and as luck would have it my Sis-in-law has an old Canon T70 with a 50/1.8 she's going to let me have. Now to get a few rolls of high-ISO, B&W, grainy film and go out and shoot.

Cool! Looking forward to seeing your work.

A friend included 2 rolls of Ilford XP and 1 of Rollei R3 + development/prints in my Christmas present. Colour me happy in B&W.

Patti · January 2, 2010

michswiss wrote:

Not to derail, but why the admonition about LR? I use Aperture but Lightroom is equivalent and I find the image manipulation tools more than sufficient for all but the exceptional cases. Plus the DAM features are extremely useful.

I've opted to save the ~$1,500 for CS4 until I have a clear requirement or project for that particular piece of software.

I don't know. I love LR.

rutt · January 2, 2010

Look, I've invested a lot of time in learning to do some stuff in PS and I'm comfortable with it. LR does some small subset of that stuff OK, but it just isn't the giant erector set that PS is. What's more after all the time in PS I find LR unintuitive. No big deal, really, but except for price, I just don't really get it.

And you can work around the price if by any stretch you can qualify as a student or are willing to settle for an older version. Even PS 7 is a lot more powerful than LR.

bdcolen · January 3, 2010

Patti wrote:

I picked up my film today. Here are a few candid shots from pubs and Grainger Market. C&C gratefully accepted.

I was trying to get an overall feel of a busy pub with multiple conversations going but I wasn't able to get a good enough perspective for any patrons to really stand out. It's just a hodge podge with not focus
[/IMG]

and busted

The second image - once reworked in PS or LR - is really terrific Patti!!

To respond to Rutt's post - I haven't scanned film in ages, but it looks to me as though wherever you're getting your scanning done is doing a pretty lousy job - these shouldn't be coming through so lacking in tonal range. Perhaps you under exposed, but still...

Toshido · January 3, 2010

Don't forget that in lightroom you can click on the triangles in the top corners of the histogram to show clipping and blown highlights.
You can either click on it to lock the display on, or just mouse over it for a quick look.

I generally slide the blacks slider up until I have some some clipped aways of true black. Just a little more that I would like, than move the fill slider up to bring back some of the details.

bdcolen · January 3, 2010

rutt wrote:

Look, I've invested a lot of time in learning to do some stuff in PS and I'm comfortable with it. LR does some small subset of that stuff OK, but it just isn't the giant erector set that PS is. What's more after all the time in PS I find LR unintuitive. No big deal, really, but except for price, I just don't really get it.

And you can work around the price if by any stretch you can qualify as a student or are willing to settle for an older version. Even PS 7 is a lot more powerful than LR.

I think your view of LR may be a titch colored by your inherent love of post processing - for you it's an intellectual challenge; for me it's a drudgery that's been forced upon me by the switch from film to digital.

I started using PS at least 10 years ago, and it's the only thing I used until picking up a copy of LR a couple years ago. As a PS user I find LR totally intuitive, and also find that it meets my processing need for the vast majority of images. But different strokes, etc....:D

Patti · January 3, 2010

bdcolen wrote:

The second image - once reworked in PS or LR - is really terrific Patti!!

To respond to Rutt's post - I haven't scanned film in ages, but it looks to me as though wherever you're getting your scanning done is doing a pretty lousy job - these shouldn't be coming through so lacking in tonal range. Perhaps you under exposed, but still...

Here's my latest rework of #2

bdcolen · January 3, 2010

Patti wrote:

Here's my latest rework of #2

MUCH better, though I'd still go for a darker shade of....dark.

Patti · January 3, 2010

You wee sick bugger. Is this dark enough for your dark side???

rutt · January 3, 2010

I hate to say this, but here is the difference between what I can do in PS and what you can do in LR. Real deep black, no plugged shadows. Two moves you can't do in LR:

Curve with inverted image as layer mask,
HIRALOAM sharpening, something even B.D. uses.

Of course the difference is subtle, but it would be very noticeable in a print on matte paper and a good B&W process.

Patti · January 3, 2010

Don't hate to say it rutt. I'm sure there's a huge difference just based on your overall skill to say nothing of the differences in PP between the two programs.

I don't mess much with my photos so LR is satisfying my needs for now and it organizes things to my liking without having to use several programs. So far I haven't had the desire to learn a lot of PP skills available in CS4. I want to try to get the photo in the camera as much as I can so I don't have to spend any more time in front of the computer than necessary. I'm sure as my eye for the esthetics of B&W develop, I'll likely change my tune.

Film shots from Newcastle

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