Monday, March 20, 2006

Ramshackle Hotel - Bennington, Vermont
c 2006 Curt Miller

Stump, Heart Lake - Lake Placid, New York
c 2006 Curt Miller

These are the first successful exhibition-quality digital prints from 8"x10" negatives made with and Epson 2000P using the techniques discussed below.


Explorations into Digital Black & White Printing

The photo at right is the image from which I made my first exhibition quality inkjet print. The picture made with my Leica M6 on color negative film. My pro-lab processed the negatives and made a high-res scan from this one on their Fuji Frontier. I converted the image to B&W using channel mixer and made the other typical editing manipulations like contrast, sharpness, etc. I then printed it using my Epson 2000P with continuous inking, using the "black ink" setting in the printer driver. The final prints were made on Epson Watercolor paper and are stunning.

One of the things I have learned about digital imaging - and particularly from this most recent foray into fine B&W digital printing - is that prints made from high resolution scans from 35mm film far surpass the image quality of prints made from my 6mp digital SLR, by a very wide margin. I didn't realize this until I had superlative prints from each, that the prints from 35mm film show very fine detail (like being able to read the watch on someones wrist in a picture). It appears that the largest one can go with a 6mp capture is about 8x12 before the picture starts to lose quality in fine details. Just guessing, it appears that it takes between 10 and 15 megapixels worth of digital camera to capture the same detail as a 400ASA film in a 35mm camera. So, film is dead? If you say so. But I'm keeping some around for serious work.

Here is a recap and my conclusions about where the state of the art is in 2006 with regard to film, digital and printing:

First, film is far superior to digital as a capture medium, at least for those of us who can't afford $10,000 for a Leaf digital back for our Hasselblads. Comparing optimized B&W output from a large print, it appears that a 400ASA 35mm negative has about a fity percent advantage over a six megapixel digital SLR. What I mean by this is that the print quality of a 10x15 inch print from a high resolution scan of a 400ASA 35mm negative has the same image quality as an 8x12 inch print from a 6 megapixel digital camera. If I print the digital image to 10x15, it loses image quality to the extent the difference between the two capture media is noticeable.

Second, digital prints made from a 35mm negative can be extraordinary! The picture today is the 10x15 print I made from a 400ASA color negative from my Leica, manipulated in Photoshop, converted to B&W and output from my Epson 2000P printer (using black ink only). The print is nothing short of exquisite, and I will be happy to continue to print digitally from my 35mm negatives.

Finally, while I don't have a good film scanner, my pro-lab does. The print above was made from a negative scanned to a high resolution by my lab. I am unable to duplcate this quality with the scanner I do have and, I suspect, if the same negative were scanned with a drum scanner, the possibility for a knockout 20x30 print becomes a tempting proposition for me to try next. If is does work out, that means we would need a full 20 megapixels worth of digital capture to get the quality we've got laying around in lowly, low-tech film. Interestingly, that's exactly what experts were saying six or seven years ago when everyone became so enamored with digital capture and were claiming their 1.2 megapixel cameras "blew away" film.

Yea, right.