Month: October 2017

Today’s Question: I have a black & white film negative. How do I convert it in Photoshop or Lightroom to print an image?

Tim’s Quick Answer: For a black and white film negative I recommend first scanning the film in color, then converting to black and white and optimizing for the final print.

More Detail: As a general rule it is best to work with a full-color image even when your intent is to produce a black and white final result. That is because the color version of the image will have more information to work with, which in turn can help you produce a final image with greater detail and overall quality.

Of course, with a black and white negative it might seem a little silly to scan the film as a color image, since in concept the film doesn’t contain any color. However, there is generally at least a slight degree of color in the film, even if that is only the “orange mask” that is added to some films. Naturally you will also want to be sure to (in general) scan at the highest optical resolution of the scanner being used to scan the film, and save the image as a TIFF or PSD (not a JPEG) to preserve overall image quality.

Once you have scanned the film, you can optimize the resulting image to prepare it to be printed. In the context of Photoshop that would likely mean first adding a Black & White adjustment layer, and in Lightroom you could choose the “Black & White” option for the Treatment setting in the Basic section of adjustments. You’ll also of course want to optimize the overall image in overall tonality, detail, texture, and sharpness.

For the final print, you may also need to compensate for the capabilities of your printer. Many printers, for example, aren’t able to render full detail in the dark shadow areas. You can compensate by lightening up the value for the black point and darken down the value for the white point. This is something that would generally involve a degree of testing of your printer, so you know how much of a compensation to apply to produce a print with maximum detail.

It is also worth noting that in general you will want to use a custom printer profile, or custom software settings for your printer, to help ensure that the print is actually perfectly neutral. In many (or most) cases you will be using all of the ink colors in your printer to produce a black and white print, and it can sometimes be a challenge to produce a print that is perfectly neutral with only shades of gray, and without any hint of color cast.

Today’s Question: You’ve said a variety of things about the Adobe DNG [digital negative] file format, some good and some bad. But what I really want to know is, all things considered, should I convert my raw captures to DNG?

Tim’s Quick Answer: In a word, no. Taking all of the various factors into account, my personal preference (and general recommendation) would be to retain the original raw captures from your camera, and to not convert those original captures to the Adobe DNG format.

More Detail: Let me say right from the start that there are absolutely some great benefits to the use of the Adobe DNG file format compared to proprietary raw capture formats. I’m not suggesting that converting raw captures to DNG is somehow “bad”. I simply feel that on balance I’d rather retain the original raw capture format rather than converting those files to DNG and deleting the original captures. And I also don’t feel it makes a lot of sense to both convert to DNG and still retain your original raw captures.

One of the key reasons I prefer to retain the original raw captures is that they represent the original capture with no modification whatsoever. While the Adobe DNG format retains the pixel data from your original capture, there are some “private” metadata from the camera that may be lost. That information would generally relate to unique features of a specific camera model, which would require software from the camera manufacturer to fully leverage.

I also prefer to keep metadata updates separate from the original capture data. In the context of a raw capture that means, for example, having metadata updates written to an XMP “sidecar” so that the original capture file remains undisturbed. This can also help to streamline a backup workflow.

One of the primary motivations for using the Adobe DNG format is to avoid a proprietary file format that is not openly documented the way the DNG format is documented. In addition, DNG files are generally around 20% smaller than the original raw capture, with no loss of image quality or detail. So there are indeed advantages to the Adobe DNG file format, to the extent that if your camera supports capture directly to DNG, you may want to make use of that option.

But in the context of a workflow that might involve discarding the original raw capture file after converting to the Adobe DNG format, my preference is to simply retain the original capture files.