LaserSoft Imaging

Hi Ian,

I note from one of your tutorials that you use very little colour negs.

Am I to asume that in the main you therefore use colour trannies?

If this is the case why or what makes this media superior with SilverFast & digital scanning.

Also what trannie make, type etc in your experience works better or well with Silverfast and digital scanning?

Thanks

Mike Jones

On 2002-01-14 15:31, MikeJones wrote:
Hi Ian,

I note from one of your tutorials that you use very little colour negs.

Am I to asume that in the main you therefore use colour trannies?

If this is the case why or what makes this media superior with SilverFast & digital scanning.

Also what trannie make, type etc in your experience works better or well with Silverfast and digital scanning?

Thanks

Mike Jones

Mike,

Personal preference and the fact that my first introduction to colour printing (1977) with Ilford Cibachrome. I later tried printing from negs and found it to be almost impossible to get good results. Put simply I couldn't read the neg like I could a tranny and so I gave up after wasting a ton of paper.

I tend to use Fuji Provia F, Fuji Sensi or Kodak Ektachrome - I do NOT like Kodachrome and reckon for scanning purposes it's worse than negatives (again personal opinion based upon dire results). others think differently and swaer that Kodachrome is the best.

To get good quality form a neg you need correct exposure, good development and a good film profile. If you've go all three then negs and positives vary little.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ilyons on 2002-01-14 21:58 ]</font>

Hi Ian,

Thanks again for sharing your wide rangeing experience.

In the short space of 2 months worth of scanning negs & tranies with my Sprintscan 4000 I have come to the similar conclusions.

Some negs can take up to 2 hours to reapir/touch up. The developing process are of a very low standard in some labs. I have found that the scanner will also pick water droplet smudges when poor water quality has been used or the neg is not sufficently cleaned and dried.

Thanks
Mike Jones

It's important to remember that hardly anybody ever produced accurate color and reasonable tonal scale with Cibachrome...it was almost always an amateur's material. There have always been highly skilled Ektacolor printers who could beat Ciba in any visual comparison, but for amateurs at home , Ciba was easier. Certainly hardly any professionals used it, except for display situations where Ektacolor might fade more quickly.

I find negatives and transparencies equally accurate when scanned, though one-hour photolabs usually do a bad job in processing, so crossover and other nasty things do often happen to your film if you lower yourself to using them (as I do sometimes, for the convenience).

Negatives generally have longer printable tonal scales than do transparencies, so they do allow a little more exposure latitude.

Some say the current Kodak color negative material is the ultimate material for BLACK AND WHITE scanning/printing.

djon43 wrote:It's important to remember that hardly anybody ever produced accurate color and reasonable tonal scale with Cibachrome...it was almost always an amateur's material....

I disagree.

Whenever we had to produce finest results (for advertising purposes, for example) - in the analog times long passed by - we used Cibachrome. No other material had a similar tonal range and such crisp colors, such a deep black.