The long, slow fade

[Martin_Doudoroff]

Having recently returned to New York City after a year in Baltimore, I'm still noticing what has changed in my neighborhood. Today, I walked down 19th Street and saw that our venerable black & white processing lab, Lexington Labs, has diminished to the extent it now shares a dingy little storefront with a color lab. Can a quality black & white lab not thrive even in New York City?

[jeffcable]

Hi Martin. I have just been trying the TrueGrain demo version and from what little I have seen... it is an excellent package and the effects are outstanding. I am downloading the film pack one as I write.

I was a regular user of Ilford mono films over 3 decades and the responses to running images through TrueGrain have been really close to what I would have expected from FP4 and Delta (my favourite modern film emulsion because it could be exposed anywhere from ISO 200 to 12800 with very predictable results if developed in DDX)

My heartfelt congratulations on getting this intriguing software to market and I will be buying my copy just as soon as a couple of other major expenses are out of the way. Nice to see this out for the Mac first and I hope that Apple provide a decent hook into Aperture's workflow.

Regards,
Jeff

[jeffcable]

A further play with TrueGrain reveals it to be a very intuitive application to use... (for us greybeards with chemical darkroom experience, at any rate) The software runs well on a 17inch 1.33GHz G4 PowerBook with 2GB RAM. I opened 41Mb 16bit .tif files without any obvious slowness and if anything, the files appeared to be opened quicker than if opened in Photoshop.

I have attached three very quickly processed results (<10 seconds processing time for each image) from a single light, location shoot and the final image is shown with a colour/mono split screen to give some idea about the image files that the mono images were derived from.

I had set the film type to HP5 at ISO 400 with a light green contrast filter (those contrast filters were an inspired addition) and the resulting images look very pleasant to my jaded eyes.

EDIT: to add that these are simple 72ppi screen grabs and I took them into Photoshop to save them as jpg files. (my screen grab is set to save PNG files and I wanted to upload smaller data files)

Any comments?

Regards,
Jeff

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