Degradation of film during processing.

Paul Howell · Nov 3, 2023

So Blue Moon used both an older non digital min-lab and a package printer. I assume that when you order a custom print is it either scanned and post processed in PS or they use an enlarger.

Using either machine the print is a second generation process. At 4X6 and up to 8X10 with a 100 ISO color film the only loss of information may (may not will be) might be in highlights and dark shadow then the dynamic range of the negatives exceeds that of the color printing paper used. Which could be rendered in a custom print by using a mask.

Nikon 2 · Nov 3, 2023

koraks said:
Ok, that's about drum scans, which is not what we're talking about here unless you're routinely drum scanning your 36 exp rolls of film at a cost of nearly $2k per roll.
The comparison we're talking about here is likely the regular scans, which are done in all likelihood on something like a Noritsu scanner that eats up an entire roll and then spits out a bunch of jpegs. They're quick & easy to use and therefore are the basic option for consumer-oriented scan jobs. Yes, they offer drum scans, too. Depending on the operator, those are likely technically better than the Noritsu scans, but like a digital camera RAW file, should be regarded as the starting point for work towards an end result. A drum scan as you get it from the lab will generally look flat and somewhat lifeless.

That's about your optical 4x6" prints which as we have established many times now, these are unrelated to the scans you're looking at. So Nora and Ray don't come into play. If you're looking at scans vs. digital captures, just forget about your prints. They're a different story.

They say the drum scans are for critical enlargement...!

koraks · Nov 3, 2023

Bill Burk said:
Now in Photoshop change the color space of your Leica image to CMYK.

This is a rather odd and frankly very ineffective way of soft-proofing. There is no good way to soft-proof a digital file given the totally different contrast impression a computer monitor gives compared to a print. The only thing soft-proofing will accomplish is to give a rough impression of color rendition of the final print and how out-of-gamut colors may render. And even so, it's not accomplished by converting the image to CMYK.

Nikon 2 said:
They say the drum scans are for critical enlargement...!

They can say whatever. Are you currently comparing drum scans to your digital Leica files or not? I know you did get one drum scan made a few weeks ago; you posted about it on the forum. Are you comparing that one to your Leica digi raws?

Nikon 2 · Nov 3, 2023

Bill Burk said:
Thanks @Nikon 2 for your direct answers to my question.

Now if you would, hold an optical print next to your monitor while you look at the comparable photo from your Leica.

Zoom scale to match size. Adjust the lighting on the print to be even and reduce reflections - if you have a 5000 K light source use that. For the picture on the computer screen surround it with one inch white border.

How do the images look side by side in this way?

Now in Photoshop change the color space of your Leica image to CMYK.

Did the computer image get more muted?

Now you would see how your Leica image might look if it were printed, the comparison may be more fair.

For our enjoyment, if you like, take a photo of your screen and print displayed side by side to share with us and describe what you are seeing because all the colors won’t come across to us.

My old Mac Pro doesn’t zoom out to less than a 9.5x6.
The differences I see are:

1. Darker colors for film.
2. More detail, sharpness, clinical, and natural color for digital.
3. Film tends to be more organic, softer and easier on the eyes.
4. Film looks more real even with less natural colors...!

My outdated Mac Pro just doesn’t have the quality photoshop that the newer models have. I do like the simplicity it has so I don’t spend hours on each image...!

Bill Burk · Nov 3, 2023

koraks said:
This is a rather odd and frankly very ineffective way of soft-proofing. There is no good way to soft-proof a digital file given the totally different contrast impression a computer monitor gives compared to a print. The only thing soft-proofing will accomplish is to give a rough impression of color rendition of the final print and how out-of-gamut colors may render. And even so, it's not accomplished by converting the image to CMYK.

This is roughly what Kodak color scientist Chris Edge (former 3M) worked up for Matchprint Virtual.

He used a custom look up table tweaked by eye to simulate press conditions.

By restricting the gamut to CMYK and adding a white border (to add flare), you make the monitor image less impressive and more realistic representation of what your print will look like.

Don’t ask me how I know or what Pink Floyd songs were being played at the company barbecue in Minneapolis that day.

koraks · Nov 3, 2023

Bill Burk said:
Don’t ask me how I know or what Pink Floyd songs were being played at the company barbecue in Minneapolis that day.

LOL!
It's an interesting approach. Can't say I'm very convinced about it, as you can tell. Especially approaches like 'tweaked by eye' LUTs are kind of...well, arcane. Especially given today's availability and accessibility of very decent photospectrometers that can be used to fairly accurately (putting it mildly) profile a printer.

Bill Burk · Nov 3, 2023

There were spectrophotometers involved.

They flew me to Vegas once to show it off.

I’m not a gambler. I brought a silver dollar and couldn’t bear to drop it in a slot so I handed it to a shoeshine attendant.

Bill Burk · Nov 3, 2023

Souvenir…

DREW WILEY · Nov 3, 2023

Here's a possibility regarding the ambiguous terminology. I know all kinds of people who were accustomed to having their 35mm color negs inexpensively rapid machine printed via devices with an actual focused light source. But once things switched over to near-instant scanning for sake of platen style LED printers, they started complaining about all the little dots and so forth. Well, that newer technology allowed chrome as well as color neg input, or even b&w negs on separate units. But the level of complaining that it just wasn't like before must have elicited a response from certain labs that still had the older "optical" machine print option. Still a far cry from truly custom prints involving some kind of real enlarger, but sufficient for many lesser purposes. Even when the regional Costco stores switched over there were a lot of disappointed customers, and all that ended up with Costco completely dropping their snapshot services in this region. Even the colors were harsher.

Bill Burk · Nov 3, 2023

Nikon 2 said:
My old Mac Pro doesn’t zoom out to less than a 9.5x6.
The differences I see are:

1. Darker colors for film.
2. More detail, sharpness, clinical, and natural color for digital.
3. Film tends to be more organic and easier on the eyes.
4. Film looks more real even with less natural colors...!

My outdated Mac Pro just doesn’t have the quality photoshop that the newer models have. I do like the simplicity it has so I don’t spend hours on each image...!

Nice!

When I suggested converting to CMYK, that was for soft-proofing. That’s how you can see how your photo will look in Time Magazine. Don’t convert your image to CMYK permanently. You should practice “late binding”, maintain the original and keep any image processing as sets of instructions. Even the old Photoshop can do that.

You owe it to yourself to try medium format film. Then you’ll take back detail and sharpness from the Digital advantages column.

Nikon 2 · Nov 3, 2023

Bill Burk said:
Nice!

When I suggested converting to CMYK, that was for soft-proofing. That’s how you can see how your photo will look in Time Magazine. Don’t convert your image to CMYK permanently. You should practice “late binding”, maintain the original and keep any image processing as sets of instructions. Even the old Photoshop can do that.

You owe it to yourself to try medium format film. Then you’ll take back detail and sharpness from the Digital advantages column.

I’d like to keep them on the digital side…!

Bill Burk · Nov 3, 2023

Nikon 2 said:
I’d like to keep them on the digital side…!

A little bit older now, the digital / analog divide isn’t cats and dogma to me anymore.

When I was working for Kodak, in the realm of online graphic arts color accuracy, I was worried the company could claim my work as theirs.

Thus my divide here was personal. I thought if it’s digital, they might be able to claim my photography as company property. So I never talked about it here. The way I worked it, I figured I could demonstrate if it’s analog it’s mine.

If you’re young enough, learn both well.

You owe it to yourself to try medium format. Try large format too. Try collodion or daguerreotype. Take a workshop from Mark Osterman. Buy a camera from Richard Ritter and go pick it up in person <insert amazing video of someone who just did that>. Alan Ross does some workshops and if you ask around here you may find several others (I think Vaughn Hutchins does carbon prints). Heck, go up to Canada and meet Bob Carnie who replied a few messages ago.

I have a Leica too, but it’s just a 35mm film camera.

Nikon 2 · Nov 3, 2023

Bill Burk said:
A little bit older now, the digital / analog divide isn’t cats and dogma to me anymore.

When I was working for Kodak, in the realm of online graphic arts color accuracy, I was worried the company could claim my work as theirs.

Thus my divide here was personal. I thought if it’s digital, they might be able to claim my photography as company property. So I never talked about it here. The way I worked it, I figured I could demonstrate if it’s analog it’s mine.

If you’re young enough, learn both well.

You owe it to yourself to try medium format. Try large format too. Try collodion or daguerreotype. Take a workshop from Mark Osterman. Buy a camera from Richard Ritter and go pick it up in person <insert amazing video of someone who just did that>. Alan Ross does some workshops and if you ask around here you may find several others (I think Vaughn Hutchins does carbon prints). Heck, go up to Canada and meet Bob Carnie who replied a few messages ago.

I have a Leica too, but it’s just a 35mm film camera.

We have something in common.
I’m a bit older now also…!

Bill Burk · Nov 3, 2023

Nikon 2 said:
We have something in common.
I’m a bit older now also…!

Well, I have noticed age brings a little more pleasure visiting with people.

I strike up conversations with random people more than I used to, today I talked with a guy wearing a t-shirt I recognized the printer of. Turns out they’re friends, kids played football together etc.

Nikon 2 · Nov 3, 2023

Bill Burk said:
Well, I have noticed age brings a little more pleasure visiting with people.

I strike up conversations with random people more than I used to, today I talked with a guy wearing a t-shirt I recognized the printer of. Turns out they’re friends, kids played football together etc.

Photography brings people together even as we’re divided…!

_T_ · Nov 5, 2023

Your leica produces a 24Mp image in raw so you get to choose exactly what you want the colors to look like.

Your film as processed and scanned by bluemoon has a baked in color rendition from the design of the emulsion of the film, then the technician scanning it chooses what the colors should look like and you end up with a file that’s only 6.5 megapixels.

The 4x6 prints have the baked in color of the film plus the baked in color of the paper plus the decisions of the technician on what the colors should look like, you can only really see about 2Mp of information in the print with your bare eyes, and the print only looks its best under optimal lighting.

All of that is to say that yes in you’re case there is some significant signal degradation in the workflow that produced your prints and scans.

That’s not to say that analog workflows are inherently inferior in producing a “realistic” image or that they inherently have greater signal degradation.

In fact it’s possible to produce images with orders of magnitude greater fidelity than your leica with film, just not the way you went about it.

This is something that particularly interests me, and is in part the reason that i shoot and scan my own 4x5 film. But in smaller formats like 35mm i like that there is some limitation on my process imposed by the color palette baked into the film that I select. It makes it more fun when something particularly beautiful appears than when I manually decide what every specific detail of the beauty will exactly be in my raw workflow. Not that either way is better. I use both. Just have more fun with film.

DREW WILEY · Nov 5, 2023

And digital capture avenues don't have their own baked-in color bias algorithms? Who are you trying to fool? Pick your own poison - but NONE of it is entirely realistic compared to normal human vision. And I don't know what standard you're using when making such comparisons, but it sounds awfully skewed to me, as if everything coming out of a color darkroom were as miserable as a fifteen cent one-hour minilab print.

Ever seen even a 35mm film shot printed by a master of dye transfer, or even Cibachrome?

Prest_400 · Nov 5, 2023

Bill Burk said:
If you’re young enough, learn both well.

You owe it to yourself to try medium format. Try large format too. Try collodion or daguerreotype. Take a workshop from Mark Osterman. Buy a camera from Richard Ritter and go pick it up in person <insert amazing video of someone who just did that>. Alan Ross does some workshops and if you ask around here you may find several others (I think Vaughn Hutchins does carbon prints). Heck, go up to Canada and meet Bob Carnie who replied a few messages ago.

I have a Leica too, but it’s just a 35mm film camera.

Young here (under 30). Looking back at APUG, this has been a fantastic source to learn on. I really began with film as had my pops camera and added digital in 2012, once I had the resources. However, film was an entire world by itself.
I realised that with the "new wave" of film shooters, I am a veteran. Have yet to do most of your list, but I second Medium format. For pure resolution and high ISO, digital Trumps 35mm but medium format has an Ooomph and look that is much more specific. Color wise, I am curious about a showdown of both Color neg and chrome against Bayer interpolation of digital cameras. But anyhow, different tools for parallel uses.

Leica is 35mm, Texas Leica is 6x9 medium format and punches quite strongly

It's also funny to see how an RX100 is just tiny but that gives fantastic photos, and so tiny compared to a medium format camera and its film.

DREW WILEY · Nov 5, 2023

I'd rather call it a California Leica. We're actually on the Pacific, right across the water from Japan. And I just can't imagine Josey Wales using one while smoking his cigar beside the Rio Grande, and cleaning the lens with his chewing tobacco spit. I keep black and white film in one 6X9, and color film, generally Ektar, in the other one. I shoot Ektar film clear up to 8x10 sheet format. But even with 35mm, I've gotten color fidelity in my own darkroom prints that I've never seen in anything digital. That takes quite a bit of specific experience and the right gear, or course. But it also lays to rest the myth than digital capture has some kind of qualitative edge. It doesn't. It just another pathway to somewhat different sets of results, which need to be mastered in its own right to get the most out of it.

Prest_400 · Nov 5, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
I'd rather call it a California Leica. We're actually on the Pacific, right across the water from Japan. And I just can't imagine Josey Wales using one while smoking his cigar beside the Rio Grande, and cleaning the lens with his chewing tobacco spit. I keep black and white film in one 6X9, and color film, generally Ektar, in the other one. I shoot Ektar film clear up to 8x10 sheet format. But even with 35mm, I've gotten color fidelity in my own darkroom prints that I've never seen in anything digital. That takes quite a bit of specific experience and the right gear, or course. But it also lays to rest the myth than digital capture has some kind of qualitative edge. It doesn't. It just another pathway to somewhat different sets of results, which need to be mastered in its own right to get the most out of it.

Don't shoot the messenger of the wrong nickname!

The local camera store has some short dated discounted Ektar in 120. I plan to head to the tropics next year. For scenery it seems quite appropiate. To add on top of the color film quality, my dad's old Slides are what got me into film and the rendition of Slides and properly inverted negatives can be wonderful.
Portra 400 included, I buy Kodak's earlier marketing in being their top of the line still film at ISO 400 and it's not just either overly warm to airy but rather down to the interpretation.

This also reminds me of a local exhibition. I had a nice long chat with a professional photographer who booked the darkroom; close by there was a digital B&W exhibition. The discussion went about the topic of this thread but soon metaphorical swords were drawn about the art and mastery of a photograph... I am with the darkroom gentleman that darkroom B&W prints are more physical and aligned to the fine art tradition. The digitalographer was somehow very defensive despite the gentleman trying to explain the connection of the artist to their darkroom print and withdrew upon that stubborness; did seem to me a bit disrespectful for the exhibitor to dismiss something she did not ever dare to try –admitting to me afterwards she had curiosity but did not have the courage to shoot and print film–.
I do have fun with these discussions but sometimes they are just (more referring to that strange situation above) politics, ego and improductive blabber.

Nikon 2 · Nov 5, 2023

_T_ said:
Your leica produces a 24Mp image in raw so you get to choose exactly what you want the colors to look like.

Your film as processed and scanned by bluemoon has a baked in color rendition from the design of the emulsion of the film, then the technician scanning it chooses what the colors should look like and you end up with a file that’s only 6.5 megapixels.

The 4x6 prints have the baked in color of the film plus the baked in color of the paper plus the decisions of the technician on what the colors should look like, you can only really see about 2Mp of information in the print with your bare eyes, and the print only looks its best under optimal lighting.

All of that is to say that yes in you’re case there is some significant signal degradation in the workflow that produced your prints and scans.

That’s not to say that analog workflows are inherently inferior in producing a “realistic” image or that they inherently have greater signal degradation.

In fact it’s possible to produce images with orders of magnitude greater fidelity than your leica with film, just not the way you went about it.

This is something that particularly interests me, and is in part the reason that i shoot and scan my own 4x5 film. But in smaller formats like 35mm i like that there is some limitation on my process imposed by the color palette baked into the film that I select. It makes it more fun when something particularly beautiful appears than when I manually decide what every specific detail of the beauty will exactly be in my raw workflow. Not that either way is better. I use both. Just have more fun with film.

I’m amazed how much I can edit the RAW files from the SD card, even with my obsolete Mac Pro that cannot download LR or anything like it.
The flash drives of the film are almost impossible to edit.
With that said, I love the look of film anyway…!

Nikon 2 · Nov 5, 2023

Now I understand why the digital RAW files look so lifelike and more detailed.
I’ve never tweaked the colors from the Leica. They look so natural straight out of the camera..,!

Brad Deputy · Nov 6, 2023

Nikon 2 said:
The flash drives of the film are almost impossible to edit.

Agreed; they often come in JPG or TIFF format scanned on Noritsu's, which is already lossy in detail, and 24-bit color depth only (16.7M colors)
Too bad they don't offer them in RAW format so you can do it yourself (maybe some do?)

Home 35mm scanners are capable of 48-bit color, even RAW. allowing more capability to adjust to your liking, just like your digital camera RAW files.
I would never trust a lab scan's color accuracy.

Nikon 2 · Nov 6, 2023

Brad Deputy said:
Agreed; they often come in JPG or TIFF format scanned on Noritsu's, which is already lossy in detail, and 24-bit color depth only (16.7M colors)
Too bad they don't offer them in RAW format so you can do it yourself (maybe some do?)

Home 35mm scanners are capable of 48-bit color, even RAW. allowing more capability to adjust to your liking, just like your digital camera RAW files.
I would never trust a lab scan's color accuracy.

I get the premium scans that are better than the JPEG but not as good as the TIFF…!

MattKing · Nov 6, 2023

Nikon 2 said:
I get the premium scans that are better than the JPEG but not as good as the TIFF…!

I am intrigued .
FWIW, while lossy storage formats like jpeg aren't ideal, a good quality, reasonably high resolution jpeg is much better than a mediocre TIFF.
As has been said numerous times in this thread, it is the knowledge and experience and skill and care of the operator that matters the most.

Degradation of film during processing.

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Degradation of film during processing.

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