I recently revisited scans of a series of old 6x7 Kodak Portra 120 color negs done on my Imacon flextight scanner. The colors were mucked up by the passage of time but I liked the images enough to try converting, adjusting and exporting them as 16-bit black and white tiff files and was VERY happy with the results.
When I tried to repeat the same process with raw files from my canon 5d and emotion75 MFDB via Capture One the resulting black and white files where lifeless compared with the black and white scans of the color negs no matter how much twitching I did.
So now I consider returning to shooting film for outputting as B&W images and am wondering what difference in tonal range, Dmax etc if any I am likely to see in my scans if I use COLOR negative film (eg Portra 400+C41 processing) and convert the raw scans to black and white compared to shooting and scanning B&W negative film (eg T-Max 400 processed in TMax developer) that I guess depends on the specific technical characteristics of each of these films and how they react to scanning that I don't know much about?
Yes, I know this is a sacrilegious question that maybe does not make sense: who would want to butcher perfectly good color neg film if you can just shoot with less expensive and more robust black and white film (which is maybe why I have had no response to a similar thread posted on a different forum a week ago?) but as they say the "devil is in the detail" and the results I got from converting color neg scans to black and white were for me worth continuing to explore.
When I tried to repeat the same process with raw files from my canon 5d and emotion75 MFDB via Capture One the resulting black and white files where lifeless compared with the black and white scans of the color negs no matter how much twitching I did.
So now I consider returning to shooting film for outputting as B&W images and am wondering what difference in tonal range, Dmax etc if any I am likely to see in my scans if I use COLOR negative film (eg Portra 400+C41 processing) and convert the raw scans to black and white compared to shooting and scanning B&W negative film (eg T-Max 400 processed in TMax developer) that I guess depends on the specific technical characteristics of each of these films and how they react to scanning that I don't know much about?
Yes, I know this is a sacrilegious question that maybe does not make sense: who would want to butcher perfectly good color neg film if you can just shoot with less expensive and more robust black and white film (which is maybe why I have had no response to a similar thread posted on a different forum a week ago?) but as they say the "devil is in the detail" and the results I got from converting color neg scans to black and white were for me worth continuing to explore.