articles/Landscape/standuporgotobed-page2

Stand Up Or Go To Bed? - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Paul Gallagher Published 01/08/2007

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.

the soft swaths of sky and cloud. I have never seen grain in a cloud before and this was something that for me made the Imacon fall to its knees! Maybe with careful alteration and adjustment at the scanning stage this issue could be remedied to some degree or maybe adding blur to the final image would work but from what I have experienced in both the PII and X5 it would certainly be a step backward. This considered, the sharpness of the foreground produced by the Imacon machines would be an added bonus and remove the need for excessive amounts of sharpening in Photoshop and certainly needed with a negative deriving from low acutance, finegrain developers.

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