Spotting Photographs

If you're a photographer and you've never picked up a copy of Ansel Adams's "Technical Series", it's well worth the money and time. The "Technical Series" consists of four books: The Camera, The Negative, The Print, and Examples: Making of 40 Photographs. Be sure you get the works by Ansel Adams himself, though. A number of writers have come along after the fact and used Adams's name on their books, but it's Adams's own books I'm referring to here.

In his book, The Print, Adams devotes a lot of space to the process of spotting a photographic print. Let's face it, negatives are dust magnets. It happens when they're in the camera, which results in light spots in the negative that translate to dark spots in the print. It happens in the enlarger, which results in dark spots of dust on the negative that translate to light spots in the print. And don't think for a moment that the coming of the Digital Darkroom Age has taken large format photography away from all this. Dust shows up in scanners, too. Even digital SLRs get dusty inside, which is why so many of the new ones come with dust removal systems of one description or another.

But I'm getting off topic. Earlier today I spent about an hour in Photoshop spotting a scan of a negative I took back in 1996. That was one nasty scan. It had dark spots, it had light spots, it had hairs, it had everything you can imagine might get on a negative besides sneaker prints! But after some very careful application of the rubber stamp tool using a feathered brush, things finally started coming clean. The picture was uploaded, prints were set up, and everything seemed hunky-dory.

Except for this odd artifact at the lower edge of all the print previews... All of them showed an odd white band at the bottom. Real? Surely not...

It turns out it was. Chalk this one up to the digital darkroom: On a print enlarger, your projected image darkens the paper. Unexposed paper comes out white. So a slight discrepancy in the placement of the negative might bump in the white margins of the print, but it wouldn't make a glaring artifact like the one I saw.

But with a digital image, if the image is presented on a white background, black border artifacts show up glaringly. Likewise, if the image is presented on a black background, white border artifacts show up glaringly. There's no getting around it.

In the end I pulled the prints, re-cropped the image to get rid of the artifact at the lower edge, and re-posted it to re-create the prints.

As a matter of practice, it doesn't hurt to bump up the canvas size with a black border, then a white border while you're editing a picture, just to take a look at the edges. Window borders can hide details that can make or break an image while printing.

Tom