Scanning Colour negatives (and comparing them to the digital process).

A few months ago, during one of Richard's sessions, we finally got to use what I call a traditional film SLR camera. We paired ourselves up, with the plan to use half of the film each. So I went left down Barlow Moor Road, with Andy Hill in tow (for he was to use the second half of the film), and started "playing around" with slow shutter for the traffic, along with shallow depth of field on the walls and staircases of the college (and an arrow painted on the floor further down the road). My "shoot" really came into its own when I happened across two old ladies sat a bus stop at the end of Princess Road, who I asked to pose. I remember my final shot was of another person waiting for a bus with her back turned to me.

This is all by-the-by, though, for- after waiting a few months for them to be developed- my shots were somehow lost after Andy cut his half off. This being the case, I was only able to scan some random pictures taken by another student. So obviously not the same emotional attachment to my own pictures, but at least I have something to show.

The scanner I used was college's Epson v700 flatbed photo scanner.

This is how I scanned them:

1) Taped the negs to the film holder (basically a black bracket that fits on top of the glass of the flatbed scanner).
2) Turn this upside down.
3) Pressed Preview on the scanner first (settings on the scanner: 2400dpi, 24-bit colour, colour negative film).
4) Pressed Scan and waited for the image to load on the computer.

And here they are:

  And this is me trying to make something from then in Photoshop. This seemed the natural next step from here.

With a Levels adjustment layer, I have deepened the blacks and shadows to make it more punchy. I then used a Curves layer to increase the reds in the midtones (for I thought that's what it lacked) and the blues in the highlights. Whilst doing this I noticed the presets available in Curves, which I will explore now, with the view of maybe using it in my Experimental unit.

Interesting take on it. Basically, the negative present completely inverts the curves, sending black to white, and vice versa. I have included a screen shot of this below.

This is an ordinary starting point for the Curve, in  that the RGB lines begin at the bottom left and go up diagonally to the right from the shadows to the highlights in the histogram.

This shows the curves preset for the colour negative. It is an inversion of what usually happens, as here the R, G and B lines go from the top left (blacks/darks/shadows) downwards across the histogram showing the tones of the image.

  Of course, since the whole point of this exercise, was in many ways to compare film photography with digital photography. As I have discussed already in my detailed post on my Smiths album cover, film records information in a different way. Grain is random based on the "fluctuations of high-frequency variations in an image" (1), whereas digital records tonal information in a strictly linear style (remember: ones and zeros). 

  This being said, the curves about take into account the frame of the actual negative itself, with all its lines, numbers and cut-off points. Avid film/traditional photography buffs (such as our tutor Mr. John Kiely) hark back to the days when producing contact sheets, and literally marking them with different colours according to preference. Below is an example of a contact sheet.

Elliot Erwitt marks what is quite possibly his favourite image from this contact sheet. This is from the famous Magnum book that shows the contact sheets of its famous photographers (2). 

This has also been used to creative effect. During our time in London with the Foundation Degree group back in November, we visited Tate Modern to view the work of the famous photographer, William Klein, witnessing how he incorporates the contact process into the exhibited work itself as a self-conscious nod to the medium he used. 

Klein's mix of an old film negative and graphic design. A digital representation of the film process. Something worth considering for my xperimental unit. 

As a precursor to the experimental unit, below is a shot I took in London itself, and then the same image made to look like a 35mm film negative poorly scanned and developed.

The original version

The one mimicking poorly processed film.
I increased contrast, darks and brightness in ACR, before flattening the shadows and decreasing the blues and increasing the yellows in the Blue channel of Curves (3).

1)   http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/1011/what-is-the-difference-between-digital-high-iso-noise-and-film-grain

2)  http://erickimphotography.com/blog/magnum-contact-sheets-research-notes-screenshots/

3) http://vimeo.com/30105671