[pure-silver] Re: Film look?
- From: Dana Myers <dana.myers@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2018 13:23:40 -0700
On 7/20/2018 7:15 AM, Myron Gochnauer wrote:
As long as we’ve sort of strayed over the pure-silver line…
What are your views of what gives film its appealing look? Or alternatively,
why is it *so* difficult to produce a true film look with a purely digital
process?
I lack the technical insight to properly explain this, but I believe it boils
down to "you can't just impose a grain pattern on an image". With film,
the grain *forms* the image, with some natural chaos. There are elements
of image structure (sharpness) and tonality that are inherent.
[Perhaps, I'm starting to veer into the tubes vs transistors territory here]
My experience with every film-mimicking plugin or action for Photoshop has been
disappointing. The results, when tweaked, can be quite nice, and sometimes even
‘better’ than film, but I’ve never had a “Wow! That is just like Try-X!” moment.
Same experience here, though I doubt I have as much experience as you do.
Perhaps the greatest fault I find with simulations is that, from my perspective,
they underexpose and overdevelop B&W films, so you end up with too many blocked
shadows and in general a calk-and-coal pushed look. (Using 0.1 above base + fog
density as my ‘speed point’, I normally exposed the 1970’s version of Tri-X Pro at
250 or 200 instead of 320, and developed accordingly for a diffusion enlarger.)
My experience, also - they tend to do horrible things to contrast/tonality,
that I think
are simulations of the garden-variety B&W prints I have from my childhood. The
grain
is a generic simulation. You'll never get the look of Tri-X in dilute Rodinal.
[Comment about Instagram filters suppressed]
For what it is worth, True Grain by Grubba Software is the best film simulation
software I have run across. Unfortunately, it does not run as a Photoshop
plugin, so it’s harder to use for try-this-and-try-that experimentation. It
uses scans of developed film, so the data for each film is typically in the
order of 80-90MB.
Oh, I think tried the demo a long time ago, I remember thinking it was pretty
good, but
the non-plugin nature made it hard to use, and it didn't *quite* get all the
way there.
Perhaps in a fit of renewed purism, I ended-up springing the big bucks for a
Nikon
LS-9000; at 4000 dpi, I found it captured enough of the grain structure of
film to
maintain the 'look'. So I shoot film and feed it to the LS-9000 and get scans
that, to
my eye, honestly reproduce the image. [Suppressing comments about B&W output,
since that's antithetical to pure-silver].
[One learning-curve item from the scanner: I think it scans like a condenser
enlarger prints, so I reduced film contract a bit ]
The upside is, BTW, I still have all the negs in case I get the opportunity to
wet print them. Also, the sensation of the physical capture that was struck
by actual photons from my subject.
Cheers,
Dana K6JQ
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