Anyone still shoot on film?

[JamesC]

Hi Guys,


I dumped my Fuji 602Z pro-soo-mer cam in favour of my trusty old Canon T90... so I've started shooting on slide again.

I've been using Fuji stock - and getting them processed at fujilabs.co.uk - using their Images-to-CD service at the same time.

However they all seem to be rather dark - shadows are almost black - however inspecting the original (held up to the light - I sold my projector ) they seem to be perfectly well exposed - with lots of detail where the scans show dark shadow - I can't believe my T90s usually perfect metering has screwed up.



This shot is straight from the CD - no change of levels etc...

(I accept my lens is making them a bit dark around the bottom edges - but the scan seems to have accentuated them.)

It's almost like the scan has compressed the range of brightness... I'm not too sure...

Photoshop's CS Shadow/Highlight control works a bit of magic on the image - but I don't think I'm getting the optimum from the slide.

Any suggestions?



James

[djb]

first of all, this image has a quite acceptable black/white range, or at least as I see it on this uncalibrated Mac screen at my fathers house. Screen balance is a big factor of what people judge and misjudge digital imagery.

despite what i just wrote, from the cd scans that my mother has had done from her point and shoot film (neg) camera, the vast majority of the scans were pretty poopy. I mean, these are "slam bam thankyou m'am" scans, just barely 4x6@240dpi popped out of an automatic scanner, so you can only expect just so much.

hope this makes you feel better, its not your slides, only the scanning quality and/or quality control/andor your screen adjustment and/or a combination of all.

[JamesC]

The white/black range is acceptable - I agree - but there is so much more detail in the original slide. At first I thought I had underexposed - but looking at the slides I certainly have not.

If I play with the curves in Photoshop - the shadows just come out black - where as on the slide there is a whole load of detail in them.

Fujilabs (is this the official Fuji?) want me to send the slides back to see if they can do a better job...

I think my real question is... do slides have a bigger range of colour/brightness than you can scan?

[Maisie]

I've only got one set of slides scanned to CD, and the film was too old for anything of quality to come out, but I certainly did notice when I was using film and getting them developed to paper and CD that the scans were pretty awful. It's almost as if the lab has scanned using some sort of "cure-all" algorithm that tries to sharpen, brighten etc etc, so I ended up with really grainy, low-res pics on the CDs which compared very unfavourably with the paper version. When I first started getting CDs done, they were of decent res and quality, but I think as the service became more popular, they changed the process to something faster and that would please people taking average pics. I tried several different processing places, and usually got the same sort of results

[djb]

Originally posted by JamesC
I think my real question is... do slides have a bigger range of colour/brightness than you can scan? [/B]

No, but i think a quick answer would go back to what I said earlier, there are scanners and there are scanners, and more specifically, how much time is spent on a scan and what experience the person doing the scan has.

I dont do that much scanning of neg or slide film anymore, but the $5000 scanner that is at my workplace can do a job that is pretty good compared to a $25,000 scanner, but the super expensive one is obviously better for many reasons. The big thing still is experience,-- doing scans for perhaps 3 or 4 years now, my scans now are much much better than at first, just as learning darkroom techniques took years and years of practice.

and remember, these are single high resolution scans i'm talking about, not an automated scanner run by some kid who doesn't give a rats ass nor has the time to spend more than "x" seconds on each scan.