Viewing negatives...

what's the best way to view black and white negatives?

I have an old oscilloscope lens I use as a loupe, it's absolutely ideal. I can read far more by looking at a negative than a contact print, and can judge how it will print, where I'll need to dodge & burn. If you have a light box then thats ideal, if not hold in front of a well lit piece of white card or paper.

Ian

Light box is my first choice. Second choice is have a light shine on a piece of white paper and view the negative held in front of the paper.

Sometimes, especially with LF negatives, I'll view obliquely against a dark background. With practice you can see it as a positive image.

I'm mostly looking for content. I can print most of the negatives I make these days to my satisfaction.

If you scan your neg you will see the full range of tones & details available to you when you come to print it in the darkroom. It will also be an aid to how you might like to interpret your final print.
Cheers
TEX

as far as light boxes... what would be a good, small, and inexpensive (of course) version? has anyone made their own with success? it seems like i should be able to make one if i wanted to. what type of light do they most often use?

to give a little more background to my quest... i recently returned to film, have now acquired most of the necessary equipment and materials to develop said film, have watched many of jbrunners you tube videos , and now i'm getting together the necessary equipment to view and decide what to have printed (at the lab for now, no place for dark room yet).

i've managed to do everything very inexpensively so far and am trying to continue that trend. so building a light box might be a good option.

thanks for all your help.

JBrunner said:

I can print most of the negatives I make these days to my satisfaction.

Click to expand...

I learnt to read negatives fully when printing commercially for others. Jason's right like him I have no problems printing my own negs, but that experience never goes away.

Negatives contain far mre detail than a contact print, but it takes time & experience then suddenly you find it's easy to read them.

Ian

TEX said:

If you scan your neg you will see the full range of tones & details available to you when you come to print it in the darkroom. It will also be an aid to how you might like to interpret your final print.
Cheers
TEX

Click to expand...

i'm going back and forth on the scanning option, i like the idea of totally cutting out any digital aspect, if i can. also, i run linux on all my computers and haven't been able to find any really good info on scanners and linux, although i'm waiting to see if i get any responses on hybridphoto.

either way, i think i would prefer not to scan negatives, but i haven't definitively decided yet. :confused:

Personally, I find most scanners have a pretty biased way of looking at negatives and evaluating negs this way encourages making negs that scan well, but print like crap. I've tried it both ways and I have to say that I am a better printer for not having my negs interpreted by a machine.

It doesn't look like it hurts TEX's printing though, so there you go.

BimmerJake said:

as far as light boxes... what would be a good, small, and inexpensive (of course) version? has anyone made their own with success? it seems like i should be able to make one if i wanted to. what type of light do they most often use?

Click to expand...

I have made them but prices used are so low, why bother. I have picked up really good deals on both epay and Craigslist. Might take a bit longer, your area may be different, worth a try.

I only was interested in pick up since I was looking for larger ones.

Good Luck

jason, that's kinda the way i'm looking at the whole process. i generally believe that the world is more interesting when viewed though our eyes and not through a digital filter. that's why i'm leaning away from the scanner option.

it seems to me that there's something intuitive that's uniquely human that, when tuned into, allows us to see things and produce things that really can't be achieved with a digital process. hmmm, i sound very philosophical at the moment...

fotch said:

Light box is my first choice. Second choice is have a light shine on a piece of white paper and view the negative held in front of the paper.

Click to expand...

Another vote for a light table. And a 10x loupe. Let's you see everything there is to see once you learn how to interpret it, which is easier for B&W than color negative. But both are eminently doable with a bit 0' practice.

Hi Jake
The best light box I have ever had, and still have, was sourced from a local medical supplies company that makes them in all different sizes for doctors to view X-rays. Much better and cheaper than most of the ones sold as specialist photographic lightboxes around here...
Ian

iandavid said:

Hi Jake
The best light box I have ever had, and still have, was sourced from a local medical supplies company that makes them in all different sizes for doctors to view X-rays. Much better and cheaper than most of the ones sold as specialist photographic lightboxes around here...
Ian

Click to expand...

I'll ditto that if you are looking for one. The university surplus here cranks out used but good shape xray viewers, about one a month for diddley.

I made a light box out of a shadowbox frame, 4 CFLs and a bunch of aluminum foil. It's not worth the trouble if you can find and afford a 'real' lightbox.

I'd love a light table, those Nuarc ones look sweet. I found an 11x17 or so lightbox at the local dump/garbage pile.

X-ray viewers can be had cheaply on ebay if you look. I think they are worth it.
If I had a permanent darkroom and a permanent place to live, along with the space.. i'd get a light table.

Otherwise for years I just looked at my negatives while holding them up to a window or screen door. *shrug* I second JBrunners comment about content..

JBrunner said:

I'll ditto that if you are looking for one. The university surplus here cranks out used but good shape xray viewers, about one a month for diddley.

Click to expand...

With a lot of hospitals now starting to use digital X-ray technology, used X-ray viewers are going to be very common, very soon.

My dentist's office had gone digital x-ray, pretty cool and fast. Sorry, but analogue loses out on this one.

I have a Just lightbox, bought off ebay 4 years ago. Just is a quality German brand with colour accurate tubes; I wanted that because I look at a lot of colour transparency. It's about A4 size, so reasonably compact & portable but big enough to view a cut & sleeved foll of film.

If you hold a b&w neg at just the right angle relative to a light source, you will see a positive image. It's not hard.

But yeah, light table and loupe... and contact prints can be done very quickly, what, 5 minutes including processing on RC paper?

BimmerJake said:

also, i run linux on all my computers and haven't been able to find any really good info on scanners and linux, although i'm waiting to see if i get any responses on hybridphoto.

Click to expand...

What scanner are you using. Xsane should have a driver that will work.


Ive made a small light table, and used a florescent circle bulb with a normal screw type fitting. Dead Link Removed

p.s. vuescan runs robustly on linux, as far as I know.

i don't have a scanner at the moment, haven't been confident in the linux factor...

anyway, i'm really steering away from the scanner option in favor of trying to keep with the analog continuity.

bobwysiwyg said:

My dentist's office had gone digital x-ray, pretty cool and fast. Sorry, but analogue loses out on this one.

Click to expand...

X-rays are one of the things, where digital wins out on three fronts, first is that they need very fast turn around time, second is that if an exposure isn't quite right the technician can redo an exposure while the patient is still in the X-ray suite, third they have a fairly short lifespan. Few X-rays are needed for an extended period of time, 99% are viewed once or twice within a few hours and then tossed.

This applies equally well to newsprint and Internet journalism, where the story with pictures must be filed by a certain time to make publication, but the image isn't really needed much beyond that. It does not apply though to all photography or even other forms of print journalism. A Magazine with a 6 week lead time, doesn't need fast turn around, but the images are not needed for a terribly long period of time either.

However, this does not apply to all photographs, I have a photograph of my grandfather whom I never met, it was taken circa 1911 when he went off fight in World War One, he was killed in action and never returned. This battered, faded and stained print, nearly 100 years old, is the only link I have to him, it's very thick probably intended as a post card from the time. His wife, my Grandmother, died in the late 1950's, before I was born, never met her either, but I have a B&W print of a photograph of her as well. My other grand parents, my cousin has a photo-graph, that I know well, because I have the negative, when you consider that he died in 1972 at the age of 94, and looks to be between 50 and 60 in the photo, it was taken in the early 1930's.

Digital is nice for short lived images, however history is recorded on black and white film.

When I built my current darkroom I incorporated part of my bench to be a lightbox.

As everything in my darkroom is built with secondhand totally cost free materials, scavenging was the order of the day.

My light box (this one) was dedicated purely as a way to see negative density, it isn't colour corrected at all. I measured up 3' fluorescent tubes, allowed for the extra room required then built a box into the bench top.

The reason I chose this length was the ability to have a 135 roll of film completely laid out on a light box. I just measured my light box, 1.4m long (wide) by 40cm deep.

I have some semi opaque white plexiglass sitting on a rebated edge, directly on top of that I have a 10mm sheet glass, which now that I think of it, I purchased new as I had to get it cut.

The glass sits flush with the top of the bench and is almost a perfect fit. I ran some masking tape right round the edge to seal dust from getting in as a temporary measure about 20 years ago. The tape is still there, but a bit frayed

This has been brilliant, to put it mildly, and is really the best thing in the darkroom regarding cleaning and getting dust free (almost) negatives for enlarging. I use a 4 x loupe with adjustable focus.

A lightbox for colour work, is a different kettle of fish. I have a colour corrected light box that uses 2 x 18" fluorescent tubes that were sourced from a special production run that my work ordered from Phillips in Holland in the early eighties. We ordered around 2,000 tubes, which was their minimum order.

I have also made some light boxes out of timber for my wife and a student, in each of these roughly oversized A4 boxes they were powered by a single daylight, compact fluorescent tube. The uncoiled type of globe is better, the coiled type made the illumination slightly central to the light source, whereas the straight ones gave a more even illumination. I used 7W globes in each case.

That 7W amount of power, after about 10 seconds, is perfect illumination for a full 36 frame set of negatives.

These two light boxes just have the same 6mm thick white semi opaque plexiglass as my big lightbox.

If you can source something already built, do so, otherwise build your own to the size you wish.

I don't believe that a scanned image of a negative gives you all the possibilities on an LCD screen that you can use at a cost in time and effort advantage, that is better than quickly looking at a negative under a loupe on a lightbox.

Over the years I have worked with million dollar plus scanning systems in the commercial graphic arts world, whilst these electronic lightboxes were great, the time and effort in getting a usable set of parameters for a negative enlargement in B&W photography, was actually a backwards step.

In an extremely short time you will be able to know (within reason) what is possible, what you can possibly do, and lastly, what you wish to do by a simple scan of a negative(s) on a lightbox.

By short time, I'm talking your third or fourth film of printing. At least the students I have taught, show a frightfully quick grasp of what is printable and what isn't, with regard to the range of tones you can put down on B&W paper in a darkroom, after scanning their negatives with their eyes and a loupe on a lightbox.

Mick.