Digital BW, The Print

Alessandro,

>thanks for sharing your (very detailed!) workflow (BTW, is your
bathroom
renovated by now? ;-)<

It still has to be done but the excuse is that I finished another
one just before I wrote that. The Polaroid 110A/Grafmatic hybrid
will become a Polaroid 110A/Fuji Quickchange hybrid, that's when
ideas have to wait for their realisation.

>The polyester sheet and the squeegee looks like a good idea,
I'll try it.
As for point c), I think the assumption is that what we get *is*
noise,
because the film density in deepest shadows is out of the scanner
reach (I
seem to remember that in order to evaluate a scanner's dynamic
range you
indeed check until which density the scanner is capable of
extracting
information generating less than a certain amount of noise). And
therefore,
the proposed solution is to overexpose by 1 or 2 stops, just to
avoid
reaching a critical density. Then again, I'm not 100% positive
that what I
see in my scans is noise... I'll post a small crop for you to
evaluate<

On the Nikon 8000 all negatives fall within the dynamic range but
the 'noise' is just more visible in the shadows with wetmounting.
I changed the exposure of films as well but less drastic: 160 ASA
to 100 for Fuji NPC. Shouldn't noise not be at the other end of
the scale where it can't get detail from the denser part of the
negative and random pixels are created by the CCD and the other
electronic parts involved ?

Ernst