Ize.
Playing around with the scanning rig again today after lunch. I was curious how chromogenic black and white film would look when scanned so I dug into the files and found a nice negative of Ize and fired everything up. I started with a 7200+ x 7200+ multi-res scan, inverted it in Photoshop and then started playing around.
I go into levels and pick up the eyedropper tool for the shadows. I click it on the film edge that's supposed to be black and turn it black. I use the mid-tone eyedropper tool and use it on Ize's forehead to get into the middle gray range. Oh, and I convert the image from a color file to a black and white file. The files always come out with a little color cast if I don't make them black and white.
I went into the neural filters and selected "skin smoothing" and used that at a 25% setting. It seems to work well. Everything else is just small tweaks.
I wanted to show you how well the scanning rig handles detail so I included a 100% crop into her right eye for some kind of reference. The original negative was shot with a Rollei 6008i and the Rollei 150mm f4.0 lens.
When I was in the neural filters, just noodling around, the "colorize" filter caught my eye and just out of curiosity I thought I should give it a whirl. The image just below is what the program rendered from the original black and white file I gave it. While the lipstick color is a bit over the top the rest of the image looks pretty cool. I think you could actually get away with colorization of some older black and white portraits in a pinch! But calm down, I'm not going to start making all of my old black and white work into colorized versions.
Ize was invited into my studio by an advertising guy who thought she was beautiful. I couldn't disagree. She came along with her mother and her younger sister. It was a fun and unexpected session devised by an ad guy who took a chance that I might have a break in my schedule. We did this portrait about 15 years ago. I still like it.
I keep getting comments and emails asking, demanding and cajoling me to post more portraits. I thought I may as well comply. And now? Back to work.
6 comments:
Beautiful and engaging image Kirk. One of my favourite B&W films for portraits was Ilford XP2. Same idea but no orange to deal with. Your scans look amazing.
Eric
Thanks Eric. I've been working on them. Just takes a bit of practice...
Hope y'all are staying warm. One more cold night here and then a week of rain.
Stunning.
Beautiful photo of a very beautiful person.
Your scans are superb. I also am an admirer of your portrait portfolio.
What a lovely portrait Kirk! And actually, I don't think the colourized lips are unrealistic. I think I have seen people with that shade.
What really struck me is the 100% crop. If memory serves correctly, the Rollei 6008i was not a TLR. It was a medium format SLR with a big slapping mirror and "only" a Schneider lens. Clearly, it was not able to take sharp images.
I think I have been too brainwashed into thinking that anything not shot with a modern mutli-glass lens on a 1,000MP+ sensor cannot have enough resolution, accutance, micro-contrast nor sharpness. How soon we forget. I know plenty of modern higher end rigs that cannot match that crop.
Thanks Jon, When I shot the portrait of Ize I was using studio electronic flashes which did a great job of offsetting mirror slap. Most of the stuff we shot back in the day was sharp. Really sharp. But then again most of the stuff I shot was done with medium format cameras and, for the most part, slow, high resolution films. That said, this one was done with an ISO 400 speed film so exceptions abound. I think the real benefit of digital (if there is one) is in lower noise at higher ISOs --- but it sure took a while to get there.
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