4490 and creativity
I am not a purist - when it comes to photography, I don’t think that’s possible, there are far too many variables to be taken into consideration. Also, I’m not into changing the entire structure of a photo, that’s mad! Yes, I did experiment with layering photos one on top of each other, adding scratches or adding filters/presets. I believe that if I wouldn’t try, I would not know if I like it or not. Only by playing around, one realise the opportunities of unleashing creativity.
As you might know, I use mostly b&w film which I drop into a lab for development and after I do the scanning myself. Oh, yes, this is where the 4490 comes into play - the 4490 is my scanner, full name: Epson Perfection 4490. It is old but it’s an awesome piece of equipment.
Lately I discovered that I can be creative with my scanner. My scanning process is simple: load the film in the tray, set the scanner at transparent negative, black and white, thousands of grey, 1200 dpi and image saved in tiff format. If there’s any re-touches required, I will do them in Lightroom later. A scan will look like this:
This respective image looks a bit darker but that doesn’t worry me. The result is a bit restrictive as the image is b&w and if I want to manipulate the outcome, I can’t apply another b&w filter. A few weeks ago I decided to scan the same frame using the settings: transparent negative, colour, billions of colours, 1200 dpi and saved in tiff format. The result blowed my mind!
Straight away I can see that the exposure is improved and the result is a coloured image which means I can play with the sliders of each colour if I want to converted in b&w. That will give me much more control of the outcome. So I played with the sliders and on top of it I applied a Silver Effex filter from Nik Collection.
Probably all of this is not to much but to me it opens new perspectives regarding creativity. I leave you with the final image:
Such a nice post, Perfectlight! We’re always learning when we experiment which only shows that we have to do it much, much more! We forget also too often that is because people before us experimented that we can have/do a lot the things that we do now. I’m going to write EXPERIMENT in big letters and stick it to my computer.😊
What a difference that makes at the scanning process - I might give it a try on some of my fathers old negs and see if I can improve the images. Just out of interest, I use an Epson V500 and it's got frames to scan the negs which aren't very good ...are you placing the negs on the bed of the scanner without a holding frame?