Can I Use HDR with Scanned Film?

[anonymous]

As a film user, many digital photos I have seen lately confirmed what someone said, that long and night exposures don't suffer from the reciprocity shifts with film, and retain normal color. How right they were. There's a whole new world out there!

I was reading this site's tutorials on HDR at http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...amic-range.htm, and I gather from what you said that the HDR processor only works for digital images, and will not work on digital files from scanned film, because photoshop uses metadata to help it decide how to sort out values. Do I understand this correctly?

[McQ]

HDR could conceivably be applied to film scans if you were to enter the exposure information manually.

Therein lies the difficulty though; you will need to have recorded each photo's exposure info, they will all need to have been taken using the same film, and the darkroom developing will need to be identical between each shot--not to mention all the usual requirements that also apply to digital, such as using a tripod, etc. Further, if this is for very long exposures, the exposure information you manually provide to the software will need to be corrected for to account for reciprocity. Overall, it can be done, but much better--and easier--results will be achieved with a digital camera.

Another option would be to scan a single negative using a film scanner with a high Dmax (see http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...amic-range.htm). You could then capture the full dynamic range using the scanner's RAW file format (or whatever the high bit depth equivalent is called for the particular scanner), and then "develop" this RAW file at several different exposures. These could then be combined using Photoshop CS2/CS3's HDR technique as if they had all been taken as separate photos.