Digital Darkroom: Scanning Black & White Film In Color

This post is about being reminded that while trial and error can be lead one down creative roads that would otherwise remain unexplored, it can also send you down the wrong path without even being aware that there might be a better way.

It's a basic fact of modern photography that almost all film shooters are also digital, even if they don't own a single digital camera. Unless all you want to do is make wet prints in the darkroom to pass around by hand, you are going to need to find a way to digitize your analog images if you want them to get seen. Most people don't even deal with paper prints anymore - they shoot on digital, post images to Facebook, Flickr and etc. or maybe email digital photo files to friends, family and like, all of which get viewed on some type of monitor.

"New Year Light" - January 1, 2012, Chicago, Illinois
(Canonet QL-17, Fomapan 400 film, home developed and scanned)
The final, post-processed "color scan" of the black & white negative. The negative was scanned as a 24 bit color image (RGB) and outputted to a 24 bit RGB TIF file. There is much more detail in the shadow areas and much smoother transitions between tones than any of the Grayscale scans of the same negative, even when saved at the highest Grayscale bit setting.

If you are shooting film, getting that image converted to a digital file means getting a scan somewhere along the line. You can scan prints, of course. And scanning a print is relatively straightforward. Even low-end scanners will generally give you a decent scan of a color or black & white print. But a scan of a print is, at best, a third-hand representation. The negative is used to make the print, which is used to make the scan - each step in the chain represents a potential loss of detail and degradation of the image.

Coit Tower

Coit Tower, San Francisco - Holga 120N Portra 400VC, color conversion via PS CS3

This is another Holga image from the trip K and I took to San Francisco last November.  The original of this is a color image.  The color image is fine, but the color distracts from what I think are the cool elements of this shot - the textures and patterns of the tower and sky, along with the compositional framing coming from the tower base and the tufts of trees visible to either side.

In color, the shot is okay, but a little flat.  In black and white, I think it really comes into its own. Here is one of those situations where the digital darkroom kicks the wet darkroom's ass without even trying that hard.  Once scanned, I can take the color image of this shot into Photoshop and not only convert the image to black and white, but do it in a way that allows me to simulate the effect that would have been achieved by taking the shot on black and white film with color filters.  For example, in this case, I dropped the reds out of the image before conversion, which gives an effect similar to having shot the image with a red filter - darkens the sky, emphasizing the clouds.

Black and white films provide a feel to the image that can't quite be matched by the effect of a color conversion (black and white film has a very broad tonal range, for example - broader than color film and much broader than you will get with a digital camera).  I like shooting black and white directly, but when shooting color its nice to know there is the option of producing the end image as black and white.

Polaroid Digital Conversions And Thoughts On Digital Editing

One of the things that I love about film is that by picking the right type of film, camera and processing you can get results "right out of the camera" that would take a lot of work to recreate in Photoshop. However, this feature of film gets a little fetishized on a lot of the analog photo blogs that I follow. For some, "straight scans" are the holy grail, including some where only unadjusted scans of wet-printed photographs are legit, and everything else is somehow "cheating."

My view is a lot more flexible. Even my "straight" scans usually include adjustments for color, contrast and some sharpening to adjust for the the loss of sharpness you get when you scan any image. I also like playing with my images, sometimes engaging in some heavy (perhaps even heavy-handed) digital processing. Really nothing I do isn't something that someone highly proficient in a wet darkroom couldn't reproduce, but since I have no desire to become a wet-darkroom guru (and certainly no time), I'll stick with my digital toys.

Below are a couple examples of some heavy-editing experiments that I did awhile back, using scans of some paper Polaroid 100 packfilm shots, which I had scanned with my regular flatbed scanner. K hates them, but I like the effect. I wouldn't want to use the effect on every photo I took, but I think it works for these.

See the full gallery on Posterous