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Shutterbug Strasse A photographer's haven for the lastest in digital or traditional film cameras. |
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Shutterbug Strasse A photographer's haven for the lastest in digital or traditional film cameras. |
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In Reply to: Very experienced photog Switching to digital... but CLUELESS posted by Impoverished Audiophile on May 2, 2004 at 21:08:30:
Another possibility to consider is the hybrid approach. Get yourself a good film scanner and use it to digitize your slides and negatives. Once in digital form, you can use Photoshop to crop, edit, and correct for color and tone, just like a file from a digital camera.Unlike a digital camera, though, scanned files are BIG: a 4000dpi scanner will produce a 24MP file, which can easily print at 12x18 and will even make a decent 20x30. Scanned film will be grainier than digital capture, and there are some quality losses in the scanning process, so a 24MP scan won't look as good as, say, a 22MP shot from one of the new $20,000 medium format digital backs, but it will still make really nice large prints. I have an older Nikon scanner than can only do 2800dpi, which gives a 12MP scan, and the 12x18's I've made from scans of 35mm Fuji Provia look fantastic: tack sharp, good detail, and almost invisible grain.
Plus, even a 4000dpi scan isn't getting everything possible off the film. With fine grained slide films, you can sometimes extract additional detail all the way up to 8000dpi. With a digital camera, your shots are stuck forever at 6-8MP. With a film scanner, in 10 years you can always rescan your best shots with the latest technology and make even better prints.
Since you're doing all of the darkroom manipulations digitally, you can just send your film out to a reputable pro lab for processing and not have to worry about local yahoos scratching your film or making lousy prints. And you can keep using the same cameras and films that you've become comfortable with and avoid the digital camera upgrade treadmill.
The main disadvantage of scanning is the time it requires. A 4000dpi scan of a single frame can take 2-10 minutes depending on the scanner and scan settings. A few of the higher end scanners have batch feeders that allow you drop in 40 slides and let them scan overnight. Also, scanned images are almost always "rough" right out of the scanner and require more work in Photoshop to get color and contrast dialed in than a file from a digital camera would. Also, you'll need lots of hard disk space: a 4000dpi 16 bit scan of a 35mm slide requires about 144MB.
A good film scanner for 35mm costs between $600-1000 -- Nikon and Minolta make the best ones (I lied, Imacons are the best, but they start at $5k). A medium format scanner is a lot more: figure at least $2000 for the Nikon LS-9000. Add in a $250 monitor calibration Spyder, and you're still less than most DSLR bodies. Also, scanners are a much more mature technology, so unlike DLSRs, your scanner won't be obsolete in six months.
As for prints, don't bother with inkjets. There are several online printers (I've used epixel.com and I've heard good things about mpix.com). You submit your fully edited image file to them and they'll make you a chemical print on real photo paper. Prices are about $2-3 for an 8x10. If you price the consumables cost (ink, paper, etc) for inkjets, you'll find that it's about the same, and the chemical prints are real photos, not inkjet prints. Local labs that have Fuji Frontier, Noritsu, or Agfa minilabs can usually do the same thing. If you take it locally, be sure to insist that they do "no corrections" on your prints, so that they don't screw up the color and contrast you set in photoshop.
Finally, color management isn't anything to be scared of. Once you get the right hardware, it takes 10 minutes to profile your screen and you're pretty much good to go. If you forgo the inkjet printer and use either mail order or local labs for your printing, you can get a color target file from www.drycreekphoto.com, have it printed at your preferred lab, and then send the print to Dry Creek. They'll build a profile for the printer and post it on their website. It usually takes 4-6 weeks for them to create the profile, but it's a free service they offer to the photography community, so I can't complain. Once you get your preferred lab profiled and your screen calibrated, you can use Photoshop soft proofing to get a very good rendering of what the final print will look like.
Feel free to email me if you have any questions. I can send you sample images I've scanned from slides, too, if you're interested.
-Jon
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- Re: Very experienced photog Switching to digital... but CLUELESS - Jon T 11:42:11 05/04/04 (0)
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