I returned last week from a month-long assignment in Zambia and Malawi. The theme was the impact of AIDS on families. The frames in the series below are of AIDS patients/parents, AIDS orphans /street children living on their own, and AIDS orphans living with elderly relatives.

Much as I'd appreciate criticism (and I would), I'd be more grateful for advice on scanning b+w negatives. Many of the photos I posted are too dark and lose some/all detail. The negatives and contact sheets are fine, rich in details (like facial expressions). My scanner, unfortunately, has a hard time with black faces in high contrast situations. I scanned them in as grayscale, and tried adjusting levels, brightness/contrast, and so on, but had little success. It's the Canon 2400 -- works fine with color negs and slides. B+W negs are its Achille's Heel. Help!

Cutting and pasting the URL below will get you to the series. Sorry I don't know how to make it clickable.

www.photo.net/photodb/folder.tcl?folder_id=200206

-- Jonathan Silvers (jbsilvers@hotmail.com), April 19, 2002

Answers

Jonathan, I enjoyed your work a lot. Speking if scanning: I am not familiar with the scanner you have. But maybe what I do on mine will be of help. With these images you will need to lower the contrast while keeping an overall range of tonality. First, try to limit your higlights before the scan. Set them between 250 and 245. Next, in Photoshop in Levels (I use adjustment layers because I can go back and redo them later) set your shadow detail to maybe 5 to make sure you have solid blacks and also deep shadow detail. It is a fine balance usually. Then again check the higlights and set them at about 250 or so. Next, this is how I would go about it, open an adjustment layer for curves and try to set your midtones. make sure the highlights stay where they should. If curves do not work that well, than go back to the levels and open up the midtones with the middle slider - move left. You should be able to adjust your images pretty well using these two tools. I would say midtone black skin should measure around 200, white skin is around 216. Hope this helps. Good luck, Igor

-- Igor Osatuke (visionstudios@yahoo.com), April 19, 2002.

Can you do a raw scan with the scanner's software? If not, get Vuescan, because it can do a raw scan. Black and white is far better if it is manipulated in Photoshop (or some other image editor) rather than in the scanner software. Then adjust your black and white points based on the histogram (in levels) and then use curves to fine tune. Don't use brightness/contrast.

You can also try scanning in RGB and using the channel mixer to get a better balance. Also, if you can scan and correct in 16-bit mode, you may get better scans.

Looking at the images, many seem to have lighting problems that will need more correction.

This image was scanned raw and had all adjustments made in PS.

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Rampage, Copyright 2002 Jeff Spirer

-- Jeff Spirer (jeff@spirer.com), April 19, 2002.