JoeV
Thin Air, Bright Sun
Preface: I love small, high quality color prints. They are easy to store and share in person with others, and don't take up lots of wall space to frame. This is a rant about color film versus digital file printing onto RA-4 paper at professional labs. My experience and conclusions don't relate to silver gelatin processing at home and hand printing onto silver paper, so don't get your g-strings all in a bundle.
So, I've been a longterm film shooter, of slides, color negative and black & white, for decades. Mid-2000, I began working with a Sony digital P/S, then jumped on the micro-4/3 format in late 2008, with the G1. But I never gave up film. I continued shooting with various P/S film cameras, including Olympus Pen-D, Stylus, Retina IIIc, Zorki 4, Holga, Minolta X370, etc. and I'd get my film processed and printed via local shops, drug stores, etc.
Many of these prints I stashed away in envelopes and didn't do much with, for years. Then, this week, I began organizing a large number of them, dating back to about the 2006 time frame, a mix of color negative with prints from various cameras and film types and labs. I also had a number of RA-4 prints made from my G1 files.
Studying these prints was very interesting. The earlier prints from film negatives were very good, almost as good as the G1 JPEG prints. But almost all of the later prints show blown highlights and deep shadows, often with dust, streaks and scratches. Studying the negatives, they seem to have full tonal range and are clean, but the prints suck.
I can pinpoint the end of the "good" prints was when Tom's Photo shut down. My guess is that they were optically printing the color negatives, with great care. The best lab in town now still doesn't make great prints. I had a chance to see how they do it recently, and they use a flatbed scanner with film attachment, not that much better than what I could do at home. And, given the volume of work involved, they probably batch process the film in strips, so that each negative doesn't get its histogram properly adjusted for each scan. And they don't handle the prints with gloves, nor do they appear to have any professional dust filtration in their lab.
What's the point of this rant? I could ship my film to some place like Blue Moon in Oregon, where they optically print each negative, and pay more. Or just shoot my Lumix G and get great prints locally at a much lower price. But from a practical standpoint, at least here in my town, color negative doesn't yield better images than cheap digital - even a cell phone image printed onto RA-4 looks better than a crappy film scan.
So there are these myths that need busting. In theory, color negative is a great medium; in actual practice, not so much, because they aren't handled, scanned and printed properly - not without mailing off to some regional or national lab.
I love mechanical film cameras, but strict mechanics doesn't guarantee good color prints.
You should consider yourself lucky if you have a local lab that does a good job with scanning and printing color negative film, because if I didn't know any better - without looking at the negatives themselves - it would look like the cheapest digital print blows away the best color film print. I wish that weren't the case, but it is.
~Joe
So, I've been a longterm film shooter, of slides, color negative and black & white, for decades. Mid-2000, I began working with a Sony digital P/S, then jumped on the micro-4/3 format in late 2008, with the G1. But I never gave up film. I continued shooting with various P/S film cameras, including Olympus Pen-D, Stylus, Retina IIIc, Zorki 4, Holga, Minolta X370, etc. and I'd get my film processed and printed via local shops, drug stores, etc.
Many of these prints I stashed away in envelopes and didn't do much with, for years. Then, this week, I began organizing a large number of them, dating back to about the 2006 time frame, a mix of color negative with prints from various cameras and film types and labs. I also had a number of RA-4 prints made from my G1 files.
Studying these prints was very interesting. The earlier prints from film negatives were very good, almost as good as the G1 JPEG prints. But almost all of the later prints show blown highlights and deep shadows, often with dust, streaks and scratches. Studying the negatives, they seem to have full tonal range and are clean, but the prints suck.
I can pinpoint the end of the "good" prints was when Tom's Photo shut down. My guess is that they were optically printing the color negatives, with great care. The best lab in town now still doesn't make great prints. I had a chance to see how they do it recently, and they use a flatbed scanner with film attachment, not that much better than what I could do at home. And, given the volume of work involved, they probably batch process the film in strips, so that each negative doesn't get its histogram properly adjusted for each scan. And they don't handle the prints with gloves, nor do they appear to have any professional dust filtration in their lab.
What's the point of this rant? I could ship my film to some place like Blue Moon in Oregon, where they optically print each negative, and pay more. Or just shoot my Lumix G and get great prints locally at a much lower price. But from a practical standpoint, at least here in my town, color negative doesn't yield better images than cheap digital - even a cell phone image printed onto RA-4 looks better than a crappy film scan.
So there are these myths that need busting. In theory, color negative is a great medium; in actual practice, not so much, because they aren't handled, scanned and printed properly - not without mailing off to some regional or national lab.
I love mechanical film cameras, but strict mechanics doesn't guarantee good color prints.
You should consider yourself lucky if you have a local lab that does a good job with scanning and printing color negative film, because if I didn't know any better - without looking at the negatives themselves - it would look like the cheapest digital print blows away the best color film print. I wish that weren't the case, but it is.
~Joe
