Stand Up Or Go To Bed?

Paul Gallagher LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHER

As a landscape photographer and also as a fine art photographer it would seem logical for me to pursue the most detail from the negatives that I have painstakingly hand processed. I currently use, and am suitably impressed with, the flatbed Epson Perfection V750 PRO and frequently hear of many of my fellow fine art photographer friends swearing by their upstanding Imacon scanners and the wonders they behold. I have always used flatbed scanners and in recent years they have clearly improved compared to the scanning results in my old files; but is the price tag of the Imacon worth it for what I would use it for, and furthermore, what are the benefits to me working predominantly in monochrome?

As a way of establishing this, one of my most recent negatives processed in the extra fine developer Prescysol EF, was subjected to testing with the good will of Calumet, Paul McMullin and our editor. For this test this 5x4 negative was scanned in McMullin’s older Imacon P II, the new Imacon X5 (courtesy of Calumet - not connected with the BMW car!) and finally my own and McNamee’s Epson V750 PROs. I was presented with three sets of results: namely a comparison of luminance, the results (complete with histograms) and finally the sharpness. Firstly, I compared the results of the luminance and levels noting the flat-line scan from the Epson was, as the name suggests, an extremely flat rendering with low contrast and some way from what I would deem as an acceptable result. Secondly, I studied the results of the Imacon scanners with the PII scan being hand-adjusted using curves and the X5 on auto settings. When comparing these it was clear that they were both very similar in tonal rendition and contrast and certainly offered a good starting point from which to work dodging and burning in Photoshop. The results from the Epson, when set to auto exposure, gave similar tonal ranges to the Imacon scanners but with a slight increase in contrast which I found equally satisfying and, if I am to be honest, closer to the staring point I would be seeking as a raw scan prior to subjecting the file to manipulation. All of these scanners can of course be adjusted using curves before committing to the final scan and all proved that they could obtain enough information and tonal range as the basis for a starting point.

Given that contrast is adjustable prior to scanning, my main interest in the results from the scans was the way in which the scanners reproduced the sharpness and detail and this was, for me, one of the challenges. On first comparison of all three it was patently obvious that, without employing any sharpening at all at the scanning stage, the Imacon machines won hands down with regards to definition in small detail and acutance. There was little discernable difference between the PII and the X5 Imacons in terms of sharpness and both showed beautiful detail in the fine strands of the marram grasses and sand details in the image, whereas the Epson was notably different and much softer, requiring a great deal more sharpening in Photoshop to recover the detail back into the file. There was, however, one crunch for me in comparing the scanners and how they performed and a crunch it was! As a landscape photographer I love smooth transitions of greys in the skies and like the smoothness of the clouds to be faithfully reproduced in the image just as I had seen them. As I mentioned, I am currently using the Epson scanner which clearly renders detail softer than the Imacons. My workflow is to scan, adjust the image to the desired tonal range and then finish with a two-stage selective sharpening of parts of the image. When I mentioned ‘crunch’ I was specifically talking of the grain in the skies and clouds that was recorded by the Imacon scanners. This for me would be a major distraction and constant source of annoyance. What I have come to like about the Epson machine is the fact that I can obtain the desired tonal range and retain the smoothness or lack of grain in the skies and clouds, and then I finally finish off my image processing with sharpening ONLY the foreground. For me this is exactly what we see in nature; sharp detail at our feet, middle ground and distance and above

The top left scan is the finished image complete with dodging and burning. The 8-bit luminance values for all the scans are as follows

120 90
162 146
134

Overall therefore my judgment (made completely independently) was to darken the image. If the variation in tone is looked at (via the statistical standard deviation of the tone values) you can see that my dodged, final image has more contrast and variation as well – almost three times that of the flat scan and a little up on the other scans. This reflects what the eye can see in the final image, the sand is slightly darker, with more contrast and the whites of the clouds are set towards pure white.

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Photo Quote: The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. - Henri Cartier-Bresson