Film maximum sharpness?

[Julian Thompson]

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And then there is this kind of thing on B&W 400CN - better but still not quite tack sharp. I feel that the negative does have more to give than I'm getting !

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[tobey bilek]

What a can of worms.

 

Digitizing film or a digital image camera sensor causes a sharpness loss.

 

The best films are Porta 160 and Ektar 100, printed optically, ie with an enlarger.

 

If you scan them, you have to sharpen them just as you MUST sharpen a digicam image, ie enhance local or edge contrast. Without sharpening, either will be soft.

 

If we get into a debate of film vs digital, digital will win givin the same size sensor vs film.

You will not see the difference in 11x14 prints PROVIDED the film is scanned

, noise reduced, and sharpened.

 

If you get into optical vs digital printing, both can be done well or both can be done poorly.

A toss up if both are top quality. Problem is only pro labs can scan and extract as much information as possible from film and you have to pay a big price for the service. Consumer scans are generally poor.

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[jaapv]

Excellent summary, Tobey.

[Julian Thompson]

Anyone using anything any better than focalblade for sharpening?

[redbaron]

The Epson 700 series scanners apparently have two lenses. One that is optimised for reflective art and one for transparent stuff. The second one only engages at the higher resolution settings. Unfortunately I've forgotten where the switch is made. I scan all my B&W negs at 6400, 16 bits, which comes in just under the 100 mb limit that Lightroom imposes.

[jacarape]

Hi, are you looking at a monitor or prints?

 

This is a shot with either a 28/2.8 ASPH or the 35/1.4 ASPH, I don't remember which, on TMAX 100. Scanned on a Nikon 9000, my personal opinion is sharpness is over rated, unless it's something taht is important to a specific image, for me an infinite DoF such as teh color photo done on 160VC.

 

Happy film journey!

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[tgray]

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I don't claim to be a master printer or scanner. Or photographer or post processor either. I did a test on TMY and Tri-X a bit ago. It's not the most scientific test ever. I just had a bit of time to kill and tried to match contrast and tones to a reasonable level without killing myself.

 

That being said, I shot the same scene on a tripod with Tri-X and TMY. Scanned both frames on a Coolscan V at 4000 dpi. Then I made 8x10 wet prints (image area about 5.5"x8") with my new 50 APO Rodagon-N. I also made crop prints (on 8x10 paper) corresponding to roughly 26 x 19 inch prints (image area). The two sets of prints I scanned on a flat bed scanner to present on the web.

 

I compared the scans of the prints to the scans of the negatives. I also compared the prints to the prints and the prints to the neg scans. I did not make prints of the neg scans to compare print-to-print with the darkroom prints.

 

In all cases, the TMY had more resolution than the Tri-X. It was just barely visible to the naked eye on the 8x10 prints, but under a loupe it is clearly visible. On larger prints, it would be visible to the naked eye. On the crop prints, the difference is clearly visible, as it is on the neg scans.

 

Lastly, the neg scans at 100% don't look that much different than the crop prints. The character of the grain is a bit different, and the grain is a bit sharper on the scan, but nothing I'd call objectionable. The ability to tweak contrast on the neg scans using the tools is very nice, while the ability to produce beautiful fiber prints in the darkroom is also nice. In short, I like printing in the darkroom, but I see nothing wrong or low quality about doing a decent scan of a negative.

 

The write up is here. You can click on the images to see the full size images. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it except for the crop print images, just so you can compare them to the neg scans at 100%. The real surprise to me was that TMZ (Tmax 3200) appeared to have a bit better resolution than Tri-X.

[storybrown]

that's a nice write up - TMAX 100 is excellent . . .

[StS]

Just remembered - out of curiosity I had the SPUR64 image scanned with my lab's Noritsu at 4453x2953 pixels2, which is still the limit of the scanner (the crop is scaled to 200%), not of the negative...

 

Just in case someone is interested in counting the bricks...

 

Stefan

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[cookjim]

Julian,

I presume you're chasing the sharpness provided by digital, from 35mm film and viewed on a screen. Here's a grab shot, (with 100% crop) taken last week with an M9 & 35mm Lux (older, better Asph version in silver chrome ).

 

Film doesn't provide this kind of 'quality', but I prefer film and especially MF film. My mate Azzo doesn't get this kind of 'quality' from his film, but he captures beautiful images that utilise the aesthetics of film.

 

I think it makes the final case for Digital, Leica lenses on digital nothing better. As the man said

" Chimney Pots are round again"

[storybrown]

I think it makes the final case for Digital, Leica lenses on digital nothing better. As the man said

" Chimney Pots are round again"

 

well, it makes a good case . . .

[plasticman]

I think it makes the final case for Digital, Leica lenses on digital nothing better. As the man said

" Chimney Pots are round again"

 

You are joking right?

[roguewave]

You're missing the Forrest for the trees. I have seen amazing prints 5 or 6 feet wide printed from Tri X 400 that blow the doors off. I have shot a lot of Tmax & it's fine film , but very flat. It's the mind & emotions of the viewer that interpret the image that really matters. A very sharp image that has no emotional impact is easily dismissed. When I use Tmax with my Hasselblads I like the very flat even negs with all the detail & clarity, but if I don't manipulate them to create a reason to want to become attached emotionally to the image, it's garbage.

 

In fact, many professionals shoot wide open using Leica's Summilux lenses so that there's only a very small part of the image that is sharp. It draws the eye & the heart to that feature & the rest of the image is either an oof area or a supporting bokeh. After all, we already have copy machines.

[pes084k1]

It is usually the scanner that is the problem. Normally film will give between 40 and 70 Lp/mm resolution @ 40% contrast. According to the sharpening book by Fraser and Schewe 35 mm film scanned at 6300 ppi has the same potential for enlargement as digital capture in the 6 to 8 megapixel range.

 

These "estimates" were from an epoch were digital was pushed. I use both digital and analog, and through the Minolta 5400 II with optimal denoising and two-stage deblurring (I am a signal processing academic professor) I could observe aliasing at 103 lp/mm in some shot with excellent lenses at f/4-5.6 and 45 degrees oriented patterns at about 4000 LW/PH (from Velvia 50 and the overall sharper Velvia 100F and Astia 100F) that disappeared even with final JPEG 99% compression without chroma subsampling (aka Nikon JPEG Fine).

 

This means after a little calculus that at least 24 Mp potential for EACH color (a 18 Mp camera has 9 Mp R, 4.5 Mp G and B and about 50 lp/mm resolution), maybe except for red for some physical reasons, is available.

A 100% downsized 5400 dpi file, after proper denoising and two-pass sharpening, has more than 25 Mp entropic content for ALL colors, againts about 10-12 Mp for a D3x and less for a cleaner M9. Even the noise importance is overrated: standard deviations of 3.5 levels do not modify a blind judgement in controlled quality tests. The film gamut is far higher than RGB and Adobe RGB used for final vision/print ant this is apparent in projection. You can observe a (very) good slide at LESS than one screen height, about 20% better than a D3x.

 

The scanner attenuates the MTF but also the grain at the same time. The ONLY non-recoverable loss with scanner is due to the internal noise and quantization: use 16x multisampling, a really big color space to avoid saturation, 16 bit and scan film stripes or slides mounted on metal masks or even better, single-glass AN masks; measure focus at three-four points, taking the average of the two most different measures, checking for slide mount quality.

 

I agree that even the best quality of prosumer scanning is very hard to reach for untrained people, but it is large. A 18-24 Mp digital camera allows for good 30 x 45 cm prints viewed at 40 cm with modest color saturation. A 5400+ scan has the verified potential of (very) good and poweful 40 x 60 cm at the same distance. I showed many of these things in an Italian forum three-four years ago. Low-ISO B&W film has more MTF (which could be recovered after scanning) but also higher noise than slides, which could hamper the true final resolution, hence, information.

 

Elio

[StS]

You're missing the Forrest for the trees. I have seen amazing prints 5 or 6 feet wide printed from Tri X 400 that blow the doors off. I have shot a lot of Tmax & it's fine film , but very flat. It's the mind & emotions of the viewer that interpret the image that really matters. A very sharp image that has no emotional impact is easily dismissed. When I use Tmax with my Hasselblads I like the very flat even negs with all the detail & clarity, but if I don't manipulate them to create a reason to want to become attached emotionally to the image, it's garbage.

 

In fact, many professionals shoot wide open using Leica's Summilux lenses so that there's only a very small part of the image that is sharp. It draws the eye & the heart to that feature & the rest of the image is either an oof area or a supporting bokeh. After all, we already have copy machines.

 

I guess this just sums it up. In my case, I was curious, where the limits of the equipment are, what is possible. But you are fully right, extremely high resolution does mean close to nothing for great photography.

 

High resolution films do scan nicely, though...

 

Stefan

[MX5Bob]

Julian,

 

Would you be kind enough to describe your old and new work flows that resulted in the vast difference in the two scans?

[tgray]

I agree that sharpness shouldn't always (usually?) be the point. On the other hand, from what I've seen, the day to day differences between films like Tri-X and Tmax 400 are minimal. One has a bit more resolution and less grain than the other, but a good picture on one film should be good on the other.

[Julian Thompson]

Julian,

 

Would you be kind enough to describe your old and new work flows that resulted in the vast difference in the two scans?

 

Hi Bob, and welcome to the forum.

 

Here are the two workflows:

 

Bad workflow (then!)

 

Epson V750, standard film height. Vuescan software set to raw output as a positive image with medium scratch reduction saved as a .dng.. Film base colour and exposure both locked in Vuescan first. 6400dpi, multi pass scanning enabled. Multi sampling enabled.

 

Then, open in Acr and adjust the gamma manually in there until it looks 'right' and apply sharpening. Then open in Photoshop, crop edges then reduce image to 5500 pixels accross the longer edge using bicubic sharper reduction and save as a .tiff, saving the Alpha channels. This results in a 20MP file of around 150Mb. Too big really. Finally import into Aperture.

 

Good workflow (now!) (with the critical changes in capitals)

 

Epson V750, slightly lifted film height (very technical pieces of cardboard inserted under the film platter!) Vuescan software set to raw output as a NEGATIVE with medium scratch reduction saved as a TIFF. Film base colour and exposure both locked in Vuescan first. 6400dpi scan, multi pass scanning enabled. Multi sampling enabled. TIFF SIZE REDUCTION SET TO 2.

 

Then, open in Photoshop and crop edges. OPEN COLORPERFECT PLUGIN - (absolute magic this). This inverts the image and sets the gamma and creates the most beautiful colours. Then, OPEN NOISE NINJA PLUGIN and apply a light noise reduction. Then, OPEN FOCALBLADE PLUGIN and sharpen the image - normally the 'medium' setting on the 'novice' menu gets me where I end up anyway if I try to use 'expert mode' here!

 

Finally,save the image as a TIFF and don't save the Alpha channels, uncompressed, and it ends up as a 13MP file that is about 75Mb which works for me!

 

Now I import into Aperture and that's it.

 

Notes

 

I keep the Vuescan negatives in separate folders - Roll8_Frame12.tif etc.. - it's great to be able to go back to a literally negative image and alter the workflow from that point before any corrections (even inversion!) are applied!

 

It is apparently crucial if you're going to use Colorperfect that your scanning software is outputting a linear tiff file with 1.0 gamma - Vuescan does this.

[MX5Bob]

Thanks, Julian!

 

I might experiment with the high-tech cardboard negative lift in my Canon scanner, but I'm not sure what focusing capabilities it has.

Edited June 8, 2010 by MX5Bob

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