[Leica] Beauty of the digital darkroom

["Mark E Davison" <Mark_E_Davison@email.msn.com>]

For once I'm going to side with Mr. Welch.

I'm equipped with an LS-2000, an Epson Stylus 1200, and I am making color
and B&W prints that are far better than anything I've ever done in soup.
They are 100s of times better than the 4 x 6 prints I get from the local
drugstore.

I'm particularly amazed with some of the technical darkroom tricks you can
pull off in PhotoShop. Recently I was working on a shot of poppies, and
wanted to punch up the blossoms so they looked more like the original slide.
I quickly made a digital mask that matched the exactly outline of the
blossoms, and did a mild burn of just the color in the blossoms.  The
blossoms popped out, just enough to mimic the effect of the original slide.

That would take beaucoup work in a darkroom--in fact I've never attempted
image masking in the darkroom.

Ah well, the digital vs. traditional debate seems even more full of
religious opinions than deciding if a run of Leica M6 pressure plates could,
indeed, be faulty. I'm afraid that the LUG will generate far more heat than
light on this issue.

One thing I must admit: the digital approach requires quite an outlay of
money and learning. The monetary investment is particularly painful, because
the technology is unstable, and the useful economic life of the equipment is
probably 2 to 3 years. This runs directly counter to one of the great
attractions of the M6--a mature technology with a long useful economic life.

Some general comments which may be useful to others embarking on the digital
route:

1. If you use an LS-2000 and want to do black and white you should work in
16 bits as long as possible. Run Nikon Scan in stand alone mode so you can
change the settings. Turn off Nikon Color Management. Then you can scan in
B&W mode with 16 bits.  Do all your PhotoShop level or curve adjustments in
16 bits. Used feathered selections and local level/curve adjustments to
mimic burning or dodging (the burn and dodge tools are not active with a 16
bit B&W image.) This makes a big difference in maintaining the lovely
contrast you are getting from the Leica glass. Otherwise you can get coarse
banding in parts of many images, particularly in flesh tones, skies, and
softly varying out-of-focus areas..

2. Read the instructions that come with the printing papers. Each paper is
different, and they have their own tricks. For example, on Ilford paper the
Epson prints blacks too dark, and they recommend you increase the minimum
output level in your image to 10.

3. You can really see the difference in lenses when you work with good
scanned images. For example, I often add color saturation to images taken
with my Nikon 35Ti. Leica glass, on the other hand, produces images with
such color saturation that I  have switched to a less saturated film, Kodak
Portra NC (160 and 400).  Leica images often need very little sharpening
(with Unsharp Mask) or none. The Nikon 35Ti images and the Olympus images
usually benefit from quite a bit of sharpening--except for the Zuiko 90/f2.0
macro lens.

4. Run the Adobe Gamma utility to calibrate your monitor. It is worth it.

5. The digital darkroom has really changed my attitude about color print
film. My local drugstore 1 hour lab absolutely butchers color prints--they
seem to always get the flesh tones right, but almost everything else is
muddy. There's definitely no need to use a Leica if your output is done by
my drugstore. But with the scanner, color print film comes alive. Beautiful
nuanced color (especially with Portra films). Long usable dynamic range
(about 8 stops). Easy to scan because the negative film's output dynamic
range is quite a bit smaller than slide film.

6. The automatic settings on the Epson 1200 are not great. I print using a
custom setting of 1440 dpi with Image Color Management turned on.

7. When I scan images, I scan so that the final printed image will have 300
pixels per inch. This seems to be a good match with the Epson 1200. The
image resolution does not need to be 1440dpi to get good results!

8. The high end ink jet printers are not really pixel oriented devices. They
use "error diffusion" digital half-toning (sort of a version of pointillisme
on steroids). You can get a good appreciation for how they work by examining
the output with a loupe.

9. On the Nikon LS-2000, use of digital ICE to clean up flaws always seems
to lead to visible degradation in the prints. For the highest quality work I
try to clean the negative thoroughly with compressed gas, and resign myself
to some digital spotting.  I have had miserable luck using digital ICE with
true black and white films--I think the algorithm confuses the grains with
surface defects. I've switched to chromogenic B&W films (T400 CN and Ilford
XP2) with better results.


Hope this helps someone.

Mark Davison