B&W Neg to B&W Print

Is it possible to make a B&W print from a B&W Neg with photoshop

Thanks,

Jim

If you don't have a scanner, you could find a scanning "service" to produce an image...

Well of course the easy way to get a print from a negative is to have it printed. Personaly I think that a good traditional silver halide B&W print is far better than anything that coming out of an inkjet printer. If you only want the one print it would be by far the best quality/price ratio too. Getting good quality scans from negatives at decent resolutions can be pretty expensive. Knowing the format of the negative would help, larger format negs make it easier to get a scan with enough pixels for a reasonable size print. You might even be able to get good results with a medium format neg using a transparancy adapter on a flat bed scanner.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #16265108
Well of course the easy way to get a print from a negative is to have it printed. Personaly I think that a good traditional silver halide B&W print is far better than anything that coming out of an inkjet printer. If you only want the one print it would be by far the best quality/price ratio too. Getting good quality scans from negatives at decent resolutions can be pretty expensive. Knowing the format of the negative would help, larger format negs make it easier to get a scan with enough pixels for a reasonable size print. You might even be able to get good results with a medium format neg using a transparancy adapter on a flat bed scanner.

Alan

Not so easy any more. Unless you have a lab. Most towns dont have local black and white printing services anymore.

As mentioned, scanning a black & white negative and then using Photoshop for processing is certainly possible; it's the way I've been doing my photography since 2008. To note, recently picked up an enlarger, so I'm going the direction of wet prints, but I digress…

As I scanned my own negatives, I don't have any recommended services, but they exists, and you should be able to find some good info online should you go that route.

And just to add, you can actually make a negative from a digital file by first inkjet printing the inverse image on a transparency sheet, using this as a negative to make a contact or silver halide print.

Anyway, just this past week, Ilford announced the opening of a B&W developing and printing lab in the US (yes, opening, not closing!):
More information:

http://www.ilfordlab-us.com/
http://www.ilfordphoto​.com/pressroom/article​.asp?n=171

For B&W I'd recommend scanning if the negative isn't in pristine shape even if you had a wet lab available. Photoshop has excellent tools to repair emulsion problems and scratches where if you do wet chem you'd either have to live with the issues or get pretty creative with using a spotting brush.

One big difference between scanning B&W and color is that for color Digital ICE software can usually do a good job eliminating dust and scratches. There's no software that works automatically (during the scan process) for B&W. Even the dust and scratches filter in PS does a poor job in areas with detail, but certainly speeds up fixing out of focus areas.

I've printed high quality (and repaired) scans of B&W and color negatives with excellent results. These were scanned to TIF using a high quality dedicated negative scanner with multi-sampling.

If figured that if you would have to send the neg away to be scaned would offer the same level of risk in sending it to have it printed. As many labs scan the neg and effectivly use a digital enlarger you may be able to get a digital file at the same time.

Alan