[Leica] Help printing scanned Leica negatives!

[drodgers@nextlink.com]

Frank

>>there is a point of diminishing returns. If the end
medium is going to be an inkjet photo printer, why not sell the M6 (or
R or whatever) and buy a Mac G4, a high end scanner, and some EOS L
series lenses to make your life easier. Any quality increase the Leica
glass could give you will be lost in the final "print" quality. It
seems that if the digital darkroom is the goal, it's better to allocate
one's resources on the part that takes the most work and that you have
the most control over--PhotoShop and scanning.<<

Good point, and one I considered now that I'm moving to digital. To make an
even stronger case for this type of thinking, probably 90 percent of what I
do will be for screen viewing. I could go to APS for a really easy and
inexpensive solution.

OTOH I'm still scanning from a neg or slide. That's where the information
resides. I may blow away the scanned image in fairly short order. But the
neg or slide still lives on. Who knows where digital will be 5 or 10 years
from now. I can always scan again.

I've learned several interesting lessons thanks to scanning and Photoshop.
Contrast affects the appearance of an image far more than resolution.
Resolution is important for enlargements, but contrast is what makes an
image "snap" or a three-dimensional quality. I knew this, but my work with
Photoshop really reinforces that far more effectively than years in the
darkroom. Photoshop can only punch things up so much. A good lens still
makes a difference.

Secondly, I'm glad that my dad used qood equipment and Kodachrome. One of
my first projects has been moving several thousand of his slides, dating
back to the '40s, to CD. The slides were mixed up but I can tell which
chromes were taken with good lenses, and which were taken with poor lenses.
The difference may have been greater back then. But who's to say
differences we don't see today will somehow be visable in the future.

I'll admit that even those photos that are technically flawed have a
certain quality that only time can enhance. A photo of my mother, standing
next to the Merced River on a gravel road below Half Dome in a deserted
Yosemite, is special even if technical quality is a bit lacking. My dad was
an excellent photographer but in this case it looks like a tripod would
have helped. Perhaps he was shaking from the bear in the background.

Dave