Beginners question

[Don'tknowmuch]

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Hello. First of all I would like to say that I ought to be able to help myself on this, but I've got myself in a spin about development/exposure.

I've chosen the worst example of this on the film, (scanned in a Coolscan 5000), but in general the balance of all the negs on the roll was a bit like this:

 

[ATTACH]248683[/ATTACH]

 

And another was like this:

 

[ATTACH]248684[/ATTACH]

 

Both examples are un-manipulated and straight off the scanner.

Now, in the top example I've clearly lost the highs of sky (as it happens), which I sort of knew given the subject, but I am clearly not using the lows well, and the photos are all a bit washed out and grey. I can fiddle in Photoshop to get some sort of image out of this, but I'm doing something wrong I know.

I ought to be able to work this one out, but am I under-exposing, over-exposing, under-developing or over-developing or some combination of 2, 3 or all of the above?!? This is a new developer/film combination, but to be honest I suspect I'm not as sorted on all this as I like to think I am. So, at the risk of being thought rather dumb in this company, can someone give me a bit of advice?

Many thanks,

Jim.

[01af]

First of all, turn down the scanner's brightness by one or 1.5 stops or so, then see if it gets better. You cannot say anything about the film's exposure or development before you got the scanning right. Or rather, you can but we can't.

[Stealth3kpl]

I agree. Look at the scanning. In effect the scanner is another camera. If you exposed your film for highlights leaving the main body of the frame in deep low lights the scanner will try to average everything out brightening your low lights and losing your highlights. This is why I scan to obtain a linear raw which has all the information in the file. As Olaf says, try reducing the scanner's exposure to shift the histogram to the left. Perhaps you can set a black point on the interframe border.

Pete