Working without digital manipulation

Mahoneyd187

Mahoneyd187

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Danny
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Hey all

This is in no way a trolling thread, or retouched vs unretouched, purist vs digital age type vibe.

I want to know if any photographers here, and outside the forum, shoot film and don't use digital manipulation, lightroom and aperture included, not just PS.

I've recently come across Marco Tenaglia who has apparently returned to his roots to shoot black and white without any form of digital post production.

To be honest I'm debating it....I'm a reasonably good retoucher, but to be honest, I've grown to hate it

Dan
 
I set up my darkroom last year for that reason, missed the old days and was finding scanning negs souless.

Did a 20"x16" FB print last night in my darkroom, digital has NEVER been as much fun and satisfying.
 
Don't have the equipment to do it non Digitally so scanned negs all the way for me. In fact I'm still scanning the Wedding shots from over a week ago, dust removal is incredibly dull but needs to be done.

Oh I don't use PS, I use Paint Shop Pro X2
 
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I still use PS, but not as heavily as I did when I shot digital - it's pretty much just dust removal, levels (scanners scan very flat tone curves) and sharpening after resize and if needed some dodging/burning/masking. So nothing that would look terribly out of place in a darkroom.
 
FruitFlakes said:
I still use PS, but not as heavily as I did when I shot digital - it's pretty much just dust removal, levels (scanners scan very flat tone curves) and sharpening after resize and if needed some dodging/burning/masking. So nothing that would look terribly out of place in a darkroom.
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I'm pretty much the same, although I've started using Lightroom a lot more than PS as you can do nearly everything necessary in there. The workflow and publishing options are really clever, the more I use it, the less I want to be without it!
 
I use lightroom for mine. I don't have the room or equipment for making prints so scanning has to suffice and it leaves B&W looking flat and colour always needs a bit of work to get a decent WB etc. I will then sharpen a little (again because the scanner doesn't do the slide or neg justice) and then dust spot with the heal tool. If I could wet print I would love to but its just not going to happen.
 
I'd love to wet print but I need everything I shoot to be digitised anyway, so won't get away from scanning.

However, I'm hoping to improve my technique to capture what I want without any Photoshop manipulation. Filters here I come!!

Resizing and sharpening only for me hopefully. I want film qualities to shine through, and feel sometimes I'm losing them by over processing, and in a way, over correcting....
 
I'd love to have a proper darkroom again but alas my house is not large enough to dedicate enough room for that. The scanning developed films and taking the process to digital at that stage for me is a good compromise. I did recently got this book (Way Beyond Monochrome) and currently making my way through it and to be honest all the darkroom techniques have close equivalents in digital RAW and PS processing. So to me the darkroom is just another way of doing things (though one day I'd love to try it as it kind of gets you closer to the print making than any digital postprocessing).
 
For the foreseeable future theres no chance of me setting up a darkroom, that said I'm pretty happy with scanning and working up the negs in Lightrooom/CS5. I do still try and keep to the "get it right in camera" ethic wherever possible with my film shooting...otherwise I may just as well sell up and use the digital :shrug:
 
I wasn't thinking of ditching the digitising of the images, like using a darkroom instead, I was literally thinking of setting myself the challenge of scanning, resizing, sharpening, and using the images, i.e. no photoshop manipulation

Probably should've worded my initial post better lol
 
yep - that's one thing where I'm happier in the digital domain - dist spottings a damned sight easier with the clone stamp and Content Aware fill, than using a brush with 3 hairs and a nit on it, and little pots of various grey paints... :LOL:
 
I've just sold the last of my digital camera stuff. I have a scanner for negatives but will only use it if I'm bored with watching paint dry. From now on, it's darkroom only so long as I can afford the paper.

I don't think you can appreciate the true cost of film photography until you start printing.
 
It's not really viable for me to have no digital manipulation, since my scanner hasn't got the brightness/contrast right on anything yet. I probably need a new one but money is going on other things atm...
 
Kev M said:
I've just sold the last of my digital camera stuff. I have a scanner for negatives but will only use it if I'm bored with watching paint dry. From now on, it's darkroom only so long as I can afford the paper.

I don't think you can appreciate the true cost of film photography until you start printing.
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I'd love to learn my way around wet printing, although I'm avoiding it like the plague because it'll end up costing me money lol
 
Mahoneyd187 said:
I wasn't thinking of ditching the digitising of the images, like using a darkroom instead, I was literally thinking of setting myself the challenge of scanning, resizing, sharpening, and using the images, i.e. no photoshop manipulation

Probably should've worded my initial post better lol
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I'm kinda wondering where you personally are drawing your line, because quite often one man's straight out of the tin....virtually :cautious:, is another man's don't go there.
When I shot digital commercially, the RAW was just the beginning, I made my pictures after shooting them, as ***** as that is, in a commercial environment that's just the way things have to be, though for personal projects it was always just a quick twiddle.
The quick twiddle I carry through to film scans, a quick twiddle includes minor levels, sharpening, minor cropping, this is still manipulation but, I'm trying to accurately represent what I think is on the film (if I've shot anywhere half decently.)
If you are thinking about going down the quick twiddle route, it begs the question, what were you doing before...??

:)
 
joxby said:
I'm kinda wondering where you personally are drawing your line, because quite often one man's straight out of the tin....virtually :cautious:, is another man's don't go there.
When I shot digital commercially, the RAW was just the beginning, I made my pictures after shooting them, as ***** as that is, in a commercial environment that's just the way things have to be, though for personal projects it was always just a quick twiddle.
The quick twiddle I carry through to film scans, a quick twiddle includes minor levels, sharpening, minor cropping, this is still manipulation but, I'm trying to accurately represent what I think is on the film (if I've shot anywhere half decently.)
If you are thinking about going down the quick twiddle route, it begs the question, what were you doing before...??

:)
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Thanks for your input. I had the same habit with my digital gear, I shot raw, and considered each shutter release to simply, and literally be, capturing data for me to produce the image in post. Because its what I'm used to, I usually apply the same workflow to my film work, so again, the only difference has been capturing that initial information.

My intention with this up and coming work is to analyse and break down what I do in post, and reverse engineer it as such, and try to concentrate on getting it perfect at the exposure stage. So it means concentrating more on lighting (rather than multiple raw conv masked in, or dodge and burn), using filters (rather than levels/curves), getting composition bang on (rather than cropping) so on and so forth....

I'm hoping to limit myself to scanning, resizing (for print and web), and sharpening (to compensate for scanning). I'm probably going to be using continuous lighting from now on also, I think this will help me alot :)
 
I think its important to remember that scanners have limitations.
The depth, or lack of depth in my scans never bothered me too much, I just accept that scanners, or at least my scanner just can't do it, and that's ok.

I don't think going the extra mile in post is such a bad thing if your intention is to take your best shot at reproducing what you see on the film.
Maybe you could refocus your current work flow, keep PS in the loop but use it for good not evil.....mwahahahaaaa

:D
 
I cant stand photoshopping, i shoot film and all i will do to it is crop, straighten, correct for the scanner. Recently though i have gained complete freedom of the uni darkroom and its chems and paper so i can do some proper wet printing as and when i can, which as Ed mentioned is incredibly fun and satisfying. :D
 
robhooley167 said:
i can do some proper wet printing as and when i can, which as Ed mentioned is incredibly fun and satisfying. :D
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It beats your first MF slide on a window, and is a very close second to a 10x8 tranny on a light box.
Actually, its a different experience to a 10x8 tranny, a fail factor kicks in with printing and adds to the tension..
 
joxby said:
It beats your first MF slide on a window, and is a very close second to a 10x8 tranny on a light box.
Actually, its a different experience to a 10x8 tranny, a fail factor kicks in with printing and adds to the tension..
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i have fully tested my fail factor, took me 10 massively overexposed prints to work out that the safelight was not safe, then printed in the dark for the rest of the session. nothing beats watching the image form in the developing tray :)
 
From what I read and gobbled up over the last couple of years since I got interested in photography, lots of people massively manipulated negatives in the printing process already. Dodge and burn, contrast filters, etc. It all just massively easier and more reproducible in digital. I enjoy shooting film and I sure as hell want to try out printing, but scanning is the ultimate way of sharing your work, unless it hangs on a billboard on Picadilly circus.
 
And don't forget retouching. Some of the work artists did by painting on the neg/transparency was remarkable.
They used to remove telephone lines by matching the sky and painting it out, something which takes seconds in PS.

We have always tried to increase the dynamic range of film by processing, printing etc, the problem is a lot of photographers think it's the way to make an image better, and in most cases it would have been best to get it right in camera first. Or with the lighting.

PS is really no different to most of the darkroom techniques, problem is it's knowing where to stop (HDR, Topaz to name a couple)
 
I am only proficient enough to crop, adjust levels, sharpen and re size, whether it be digital or film, so I guess I am a minimalist by skill as well as choice.:D(y)
 
You can't convert film to a digital file without digital manipulation. You either have to do the minimum of sharpen and curve adjustment in the scanning software or do it in an image editor. And if you want you're BW scans to be free of dust and scanning artifacts, you have to clean it up in an image editor.

To get all that is on the negative/positive (the original, first generation image) onto a new medium can often require lots of manipulation. A BW negative can have huge dynamic range and is often a challenge to get it all when printing and/or scanning.

But I suspect you mean the heavily post processed images so often seen in modern photography.
 
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I did a whole year in the darkroom for a college course last year and while it was hard work, for me, I did get results out that peole really like (I didn't, thought I could do better).

However as others have pointed out, scanning and PS it a whole different ball game. Great for removing dust, which you always get, but takes a bit of practise to manipulate the curves/levels to achieve a nice tonal/contrast range from a negative. Also if your thinking of scanning colour negs then you may/will have the fun of colour casts.

I do consider myself a hybrid photographer simply because I do not have the space to set up a full time wet darkoom, but it is one thing I would like to do.
 
My references to digital manipulation are more aimed at more in depth retouching. I would consider dust removal/contrast/sharpening more of a necessity to offset the implications of scanning.

I guess I'm aiming to do just that, offset the effects of scanning, rather than further retouch the image

Although having said that....why should a fresh scan be considered unusable or undesirable? I'm sure some shots can get away with nothing, I've posted an unretouched shot on here before that was seemingly well received
 
Mahoneyd187 said:
Although having said that....why should a fresh scan be considered unusable or undesirable? I'm sure some shots can get away with nothing, I've posted an unretouched shot on here before that was seemingly well received
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder :)

Like all things, there are times when you wet print an image and produce a little beauty without any manipulation first time.

Then there are times when scanning and the wind is in the right direction and the conjuction of the alinement of planets is correct and you get an image out of a scanner that needs nothing doing to it.

Maybe its just that people think a "fresh scan" needs manipulation before it can be printed or uploaded to the web :shrug:
 
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