Martyn Smoothy wrote:
> They claim it's stopped sinking - time will tell :-)
>
If they start pumping water back under it, maybe so. The sea gates are
supposed to help, but only to a certain extent.
> As for the blown highlights I don't know how they can be avoided in an image
> which includes both deep shadow & extremely bright sunlight. If you have any
> suggestions I'd be interested.
>
As far as what the film can record, I have no idea. I'm sure AG knows
lots about that. Color neg films, and presumably the C-41 B&W films,
have enormous overexposure latitude and would handily capture those
scenes as exposed.
Dealing creatively with the problems of limited latitude in films and
papers was the whole purpose of the Zone System. Using it requires
knowledge, experience and either a good eye or a spot meter. But that
wasn't all that was involved, there was also choice of paper and various
darkroom procedures to get the zones where they 'belonged' within the
overall tonality paper can contain.
> The film was scanned with a Minolta 5400 II at max resolution using viewscan
> so I think the original scans should have included pretty much the film had
> recorded.
Depends on how you had VueScan set. With such high key images, the white
point setting is very important. With the bright images here, I would
just set it at zero. That way, you are sure you are capturing all the
film and scanner have to offer and not throwing any highlight detail in
the software. In some images, I see a difference between say .001 and
.002. With many others, something like 0.5 or even more works well.
Recent versions of VueScan have a curve adjustment, at least in the pro
version, that could be used to stretch out those highlights before
having to go into an editor.
> Didn't do a lot of processing, just levels, contrast & crop for
> most. Naturally they were all massively downsized for the web.
>
> Point out which you think is the worst example & I'll have another go.
>
I looked at three. Venice-Rio_de_la_Paglia-01 actually turns out not to
have much, if any, lost highlight detail, the highlights are just
squished up at the very top of the histogram. Particularly in the more
extreme version, you can see that there is even some sky/cloud detail,
but the compression process has reduced it to only about three values in
chunky blocks. Working with the original, you should be able to get a
little pleasing differentiation in the sky.
Venice-San_Giorgio-01 & 2 indeed have blown highlights, but again, there
is a lot of highlight tonality detail squished up top that can be
rearranged. 01 turns out to be worse in that regard than 02, where
everything but the one building facade and a bit of the campanile can be
recovered even in the JPEG
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/Smoothy/>.
Moose
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