 In this Friday Nights vlog, we're going scan to print. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer. But with a family to feed and bills to pay, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. It was time to follow my passion. Come along on my journey to become the best black in my photographer I can be. Whether it be film or digital, I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures and hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Bright in the Edge. Today, I thought I'd share my workflow for scanning film, in this case, a 4x5 transparency, and my editing process, and then how I go about printing the image. It's pretty straightforward. Nothing fancy here. This is a piece of 4x5 transparency film that I'm going to convert to black and white. And then I'm going to be making a 20 by 24 inch print. And I'll be printing my image through Impix. I've had quite a few images printed through them and they seem to turn out pretty good. Let's get this loaded up and start scanning. I've got the film loaded and we're going to be using the Epson Scan software. I'm going to be scanning at 48-bit color at 1,200 dpi. That should be good enough to get my 20 by 24 inch print that I want. So we're going to preview it, put my crop marks, the area I'm wanting to scan. I need to lighten it up just a little bit, get rid of the color cast. Let's lighten that and then we'll select the white point. Looks pretty good. It's a fairly flat image. Doesn't have a lot of high dynamic range. Pretty even light. So it's easy to control the contrast. Shouldn't be a problem keeping detail in the highlights. That looks pretty good. We get the whole transparency in. Now I'm going to take that into Affinity Photo. I'm going to hit Scan and save this onto my computer. So before we get into the editing part, just want to talk a little bit about what I'm using, what software I'm using. I use Affinity Photo to do all my photo editing and I prefer to use SilverFX Pro for my black and white conversions. So that will be what I'm using today. My philosophy and my needs for photo editing are pretty basic. I believe that it's more important to get the image right in camera. I don't rely so much on my software to make a good final image or a good print. I'm hoping that I get all that in the camera or get as close to as possible. So let's jump into it now and start doing some editing. Affinity Photo is telling me it's assigning a profile. I want to make sure I crop this and clean up the edges a little bit. That looks about right. The exposure looks pretty good. It looks, actually it looks right on. I check the levels here. Hold down the Option key and slide the highlights. You can see where it blows out the highlights. What I'm going to do is take the whites just to where, once it's highlighted, it's losing texture. So we're going to take it right to where it won't blow it out. I'm OK with it being blown out at the top a little bit. So I'm going to put that back. But I think that should work pretty good. And that looks pretty good for exposure. I might add just a little more contrast in the darker area. Looks pretty good. It's not a real contrasty scene, but I think the darker area should be just a little bit darker. And what I'm going to do here is just put back a little more, put back a little detail here in this area. So I'm going to use the brush and have it on black. I'm just going to set that at 50% where I still have texture up here. I'm going to go ahead and flatten that so I can check it. Let's go back to levels. Looks about right. OK. Really don't have to do a lot to this image. The real work is coming up. Now we're going to have to clean it, spot it, zoom in to about 75% to 100%. This is an old negative. This is quite a few years old. And I'm sure it has collected some spots and dust and whatnot over the years. And I can see a few right there. I usually do this about at least 75% magnification, but I'm going to go ahead and do this one at 100%. And a good tool, an infinity photo, is the blemish removal tool. It really works well for this type of stuff. And if that doesn't work, you can also clone out the spots. This is probably the most tedious thing you can do with film and film photography. But before I do that, I need to flatten the document. There we go. So now I can click on the spots to remove them. What we're going to do here, I'm just going to do a few just so you can get the idea. You might want to sit here for an hour. But the blemish removal tool works fantastic for this tedious work. See that? And I will go up one side, cleaning up the negative. Once I get to the top, I click on the hand, and I slide it over to about the sew. I can see the hand there. Then I go down to the bottom. That's the process I use to make sure that I don't miss something. So I'm going to go back down and continue to work on this piece of film, so we can clean it up. So what I think I'm going to do here is catch you on the other side. Usually it takes me about 10 to 15 minutes to go through a pretty large negative or transparency. It is well worth taking your time and doing it right. If you're going to shoot film, this is part of the game right here. Nothing annoys me more on YouTube is when somebody is doing film videos, and they don't clean up their negatives, and they show one in the video. And it's just really, that's one of my pet peeves, which is, I find that so annoying. That looks pretty good. Well, it's right there. Now, I don't often go into 100% when I'm working with film. All you're going to see is grain. There's really, all the time I'm back actually ever at 100%. I'm working with film possibly for sharpening or for cleaning up the negatives. Now, this works great in color, but I want it in black and white. And what I do for black and white conversion is I have the NIC plug-ins, and I use Silver Effects Pro 2. I just like the way that it converts to black and white. I like the controls that it has. I amplify the white a little bit. I amplify the blacks just a little. A little contrast, not too much, because this scene really isn't all that contrast, except that it is a lot of white in our dark areas. So I guess it really is kind of, can be fairly considered fairly contrasting. It looks pretty good. Fine structure, I'll just turn that up just a little bit. All right, I like that much better. I want to double-check the, see where the highlights are. I don't think they've changed a whole lot, so make sure. I don't mind just a little bit of texture being lost in here. It is white, so we're taking it just on the verge of white without any detail. It's pretty clean. This is a pretty simple image, really, to work on. I really need to do a lot of dodging and burning. It's pretty even. Now, if I wasn't going to be printing this right away, I might go ahead and sharpen it. But since I'm going to be making a print for this, I think I'll go ahead and wait until I enlarge it to actually sharpen up the image. So what I'm going to do here is just save this as a tip. I'm going to export it. Now, I'm going to size it for print. And the print I want is going to have about an inch border around it. So we're going to create a new document. Now, I should say that before I do this, most printers from what I read are really good at uprising files and printing. The quality is supposed to be pretty good when you do it that way. But since I want a border on this one, I will go ahead and make it the size it's going to be. So I'm going to raise it up in the infinity photo. Now, I've done this quite a bit in infinity photo and I find that the prints I get back, I've done it up to about 20 by 30 inch sizes. And the images I'm getting back are very good. So I don't know how much better they would be if I was to just send a raw or a native file. But for my purposes, I'm going to go ahead and make a new file for the print. So for the type, we're going to make photo and we're going to make this a 20 inch wide by 24. Tall at 300 DPI. Now what I'm going to do here is select the image and command C to copy it. I'm going to paste it into this new file with command V. We're going to want this to be about an inch. Copy and bottom, does that be exact? I think I'm going to want an inch from on the bottom and on the top. And the sides are probably a little bit wider. So I'm going to go up here to a range and hit middle and hit center. I'm going to go ahead and create a fill layer up the behind, there we go. Now I'm going to do a little sharpen, a little unsharp mask before I send this off to be printed. Filter, unsharp mask, looks pretty good. I'm going to over sharpen it too much. Being that this is four by five film, you can even see the grain, it's just amazing. I think that'll work. There we go. That is ready to be sent off to the printer. Now I go through impacts and they want the files as JPEGs. I was a little concerned about that when I first started sending images to them. I was thinking, well, if it's not a TIF, it's the quality isn't going to be very good, but I've been getting some really good quality prints back from them. And I'll have this printed on true black and white paper. And it's a nice, nice weight print. So we're going to go ahead and say this is a JPEG. Export it. That's it. That's how I prepare my images to be printed. Well, I hope you've got something out of this video today. So I just share my process and how I scan film and even with the most basic equipment, you can make some very nice prints. It is hard to beat this size of film. Well, until next time, thanks for coming on for the ride.