AG Schnozz wrote:
>These photos look far too contrasty. I'd probably pull back at
>least a full grade if printing in the darkroom. There should be
>extensive shadow and highlight detail. The highlights are
>holding good in these on-line pictures, but the cat is pretty
>much blacked out. You should be able to see texture in the fur.
>
>
Same feeling I had. Closer to silhouettes than full tonality images.
>T400CN is a beast to use in the darkroom but is an outstanding
>scanner film. I do have to really wrankle the gamma, though.
>Adjusting curves is fine for tweeking the high and low values,
>but in the case of T400CN, and uniquely this film, you have to
>make a major gamma adjustment as the the midtones are misplaced
>in the grand scheme of things.
>
Well, I was never a pro in the darkroom, and that was loooog ago. And I
have trouble sometimes really understanding in a gut way what's
happening in toes and shoulders.
But, these images, especially the cat ones, have all the tones in two
narrow clumps. There's a short one almost at the bottom of the histogram
for the cat and a tall one at the top for almost everything else. It
seems that these two areas are way too compressed and each should
stretch out toward the middle more. I think that's what you are getting
at using different terminology.
The good news is that neither highlights nor shadows are actually lost;
no values bunched up at the ends of the histogram.
Not sure how you "wrankle" the gamma, but I took a shot. There really is
quite a bit of tonal detail in the ends. The trick is to reorganize it
enough to make the pics more realistic without losing the impact of the
contrast of cats to snow, the pristine whiteness of the snow and the
unrelieved black of the cat. So for the two cat shots, I did two
different levels <http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/Blackcat/>.
Johan, what do you think of all this? Do you prefer stark or nuanced?
Moose
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|