Workflows

Alain Oguse learned photographic printing with Claudine  and Jean-Pierre Sudre  in the late 1960’s, and spent his early career in commercial photography. After retiring, he started to investigate how to bring back the photographic (silver halide) grain in digital scans of film negatives, finding the same sharpness and quality he had with near-point light enlargers in the 1970’s.

The point light printing technique uses a very tiny source of light that gives a very precise and detailed reproduction of B&W film negatives, as opposed to diffuse lighting. It is very demanding, as its unforgiving sharpness and contrast do not hide scratches and dust on the film surface. Prints done this way would often need manual (painted) corrections on paper, inducing more work and more costs. By the end of the 1970’s, it was usually replaced by diffuse light… better at hiding manipulation mistakes and at maximizing print labs profits.

The scene-referred workflow promises an editing independent from the output medium. It will typically produce an image encoded in sRGB colorspace with 8 bits, that is code values between 0 and 255. To simplify, we will consider here only the 8 bits case. Concepts are the same in 16 bits, only the coding range goes from 0 to 65535, which is anecdotal.

Here is how to get started with Ansel editing, going through only the most basic steps that should serve you well most of the time.

The video was recorded on Darktable 3, but the same modules and principles apply to Ansel.

This article will demonstrate how to perform monochrome toning on digital images in Ansel, to emulate the color rendition of cyanotypes, platinotypes, sepia and split-toning developments.

Step 0 : global preparation

Set the global exposure and filmic scene white and scene black, as in any other editing. See basic editing steps. This is our base image, by Glenn Butcher :

In this article, you will learn what the scene-referred workflow is, how Ansel uses it and why it benefits digital image processing at large.