Last weekend I had a great shoot with Amy, my favorite model. You'll see
one of the shots in the June portrait PUG.
But let me get to the point. I shot three rolls of Plus X BW and
three rolls of Portra 160 color neg. The lab was closed when I finished,
but I went home and processed the Plus X, according to my standard
recipe. I then made some contact sheets and printed a few 16x20s. Yeah,
I fussed over them, doing some test prints on smaller paper and
reprinting the big ones until I was totally satisfied. But it wasn't
very difficult to obtain some prints that were very nice to my eye.
On Monday morning I dropped the Portra 160 off at the lab. They
processed it and printed some 3x5s for me. The 3x5s were okay for
proofs, lacking a little bit in contrast and saturationbut good enough
to help me choose negatives to scan and print. So I did.
The scanning went well enough. I scanned some on an Epson 1640 and
some on an Agfa Duoscan 2500T, producing files of 170 meg and 260 meg
respectively. One of my favorite shots was a bit contrasty, with the
model being exposed quite differently from the background. (Main light
flash on a reflector umbrella with the leaf shutter lens, sky light for
fill). The scan didn't seem all that difficult, but when I loaded them
in the computer I had a heck of a time setting levels, hue, contrast,
and brightness at a point where the shots would print well. I kept
ending up with too much contrast and/or posterization even though things
looked good on the screen. Slightly frustrated, I rescanned with the RGB
curve tweaked a bit to give less contrast and the gamma pumped up to
around 2.1 with an appropriate amount of scanner exposure. Back in
PhotoShop I resorted to following the techniques for color correction
and contrast control as outlined in Barry Haynes and Wendy Crumpler's
book, titled "Photoshop 6 Artistry." This procedure focuses on
levels,using the eyedroppers to set highlight and shadow limits as well
as midtone range. That helped a lot. I made a few other intuitive
changes to saturation level and brightness. Then I used Selective Color
to pull some yellow out of the neutrals. Finally, I made a test print,
corrected a bit more, made another test print, corrected a bit more, and
finally, at long last, made a very nice print.
Which all goes to show that color photography is a no brainer.
Paul Stenquist
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