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Re: Underexposed Negatives

Mark Nelson

0:48 13 Feb 04

Ross,

It is good advice to have your monitor profiled. There are decent paper profiles provided by Epson for the 2200—or you can use the printer driver instead for settings.

Up-rezzing a file or resizing it will not affect the tonality of the image, so that is not a problem.

If you feel your negatives are not quite right for darkroom printing, then you should adjust that. I am assuming you are exposing the negatives for both digital and darkroom. A good scanner should be able to handle that if set properly.

If you want to test your scanner, scan a stouffer's step tablet. See if you are able to scan the density steps equivalent to your negatives.

I'm assuming you are shooting black and white negative film.

If you are having to "burn in" both your shadows and highlights, either your film is underexposed or you are setting your scanner software up wrong—such as gamma too high.

I wouldn't suggest using the Photoshop Burn and Dodge tools—they do a pretty bad job. If you have Photoshop CS, always scan in 16 bits, create a layer for levels adjustment, layer for curves adjustment and you can go back and tweak without making permanent changes to the file.

Be careful in setting black and white points in levels so you don't blow out your highlights or clip chadows.

For local adjustments to highlights and shadows use the history brush to paint in your changes from a snapshot you have made of a darkened or lightened version of the image using levels or curves. Don't forget to UNDO the change after making the snapshot, then set the snapshot as the source for your history brush and paint away. It will maintain very nice tonality.

Hope this helps

Mark Nelson