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End use of colour slide film?

Well, we are at page 5 and some of you have forgotten that this is a 100% analog thread.
 
AgX said:
Well, we are at page 5 and some of you have forgotten that this is a 100% analog thread.
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The OP question is as follows . . .

rayonline_nz said:
So I have thought about lately if this lightbox thing is a fun time hobby only and slide film and other film is really about making a print or printing it inside a publication or making a print on a brochure or billboard - in otherwords printing?
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And of course the answer includes - but not restricted to, viewing, projecting, printing and sharing which can entail analog and digital processes specially since we lost cibachrome and ilfochrome.

I would be curious to learn how slides were used for print. What did it take to put Steve Mccurry's kodachrome of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic for instance.
 
Almost all color photos for publication were shot on reversal (slide) film. The transparencies were either scanned on a drum scanner or actual reproduction size 4-color separation negatives were made directly with a process camera.
 
There were "service bureaus" who took the chromes and did the pre-press work necessary for publication. Some publication outfits did this in house, including Natl Geo; and a few full service pro photo labs were big enough to do limited amounts of that kind of work too. Drum scanners revolutionized all that. And now pre-press is a frequently done desktop.
 
The thing about slide film is that you know immediately if the shot is right. Content, exposure, etc. With negatives, you're looking at well, the negative. So you have to take time to print it. My understanding was publishers liked chromes because they could look and tell immediately if they wanted to use the shot. They could put a bunch on a light table with a sorter, and move the slides or film chromes around and make quick decisions that work for them. Even with me at home, when I get negative film back, often I bracket, I don't know which is the best. I have to scan them all and then make a decision. With chromes, I stick the film on a light board and know immediately which one I want to scan and forget the rest. Simple.
 

Since this has gone into scanning ... I suppose in the heyday even with mums and dads consumers they just let the lab handle it or it was before my time some households had a slide projector which I got for free.

Yep, a slide you get a immediate reference point. You can reference to what the scanner is doing not as good. Because no scanner is perfect you end up doing some editing anyway, maybe colour negative film isn't so bad then .... What I have struggled with slides are high contrast scenes due to the dynamic range, also cost is a factor also. I have to ship my slides to a USA overseas lab since the 2 or 3 labs here charge $18US to develop 1 roll here. I was watching a Olympics YouTube documentary video even as recent as 2000 Sydney Olympics most of them were still using 35mm colour negative films. So I guess colour negative is still usable and being a hobbyist there isn't a requirement that I have to shoot slides only.

I end up scanning them all, with a thought about when I am curious I can look at them on my screen anytime I want and I don't have to spend time to take the film out every time and disturb the fragile thing.
 
Alan Edward Klein said:
The thing about slide film is that you know immediately if the shot is right. Content, exposure, etc. With negatives, you're looking at well, the negative. So you have to take time to print it.
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It would have been no problem to connect to CN-processing contact sheet making. (But I guess now I am faced the arhument of having a complex workflow with keeping things connected.)

The disadvantage I see with contact sheets is their lower resoltion compared to slides, in case some editor really wants to go into detail with loupes.


However a great majority of news publications were made only containing b&w photos, originating from b&w film.
Stange enough these editors could work without slides...
 

I guess for a newspaper a quick look at the contacts was enough, indeed. EDIT: Or rather there were only a few frames taken of a news worthy event and the photographer preselected a few for proof prints given to the editor? /EDIT For them it was really the image that mattered. Even if it was taken with a pinhole camera. For glossy mags like Fashion, Landscape, Gardenting, etc perfection of the image was a requirement. Let alone product photography for a catalog. Then again, for product images, especially fashion, I would have thought the colour correct reproduction of CN film would have been a requirement. But maybe the pre press process of slides could do colour calibration to a sufficient degree?
 
I'm glad you mentioned contact sheets. I have forgotten that I sometimes had the processor provide a contact sheet when I did negative film. But that added more cost to the process. Now if I scan all the film, I'll print out a sheet that has all the small "proofs" of all the pictures that I keep with the film for easy reference. In effect, I create my own contact sheet with the scanner.
 
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Color correction done at the separation stage is more accurate because it reflects the CMYK inks that are used on press.
 
True with other media too. Separations for dye transfer printing were ideally matched to the specific dye set used, and there were a number of those. Tweaking for the specific image was also a factor. Starting with color neg film made the whole workflow a lot trickier and more involved if separations were involved, although a few people did that for carbro printing.
Nowadays commercial labs can do your C41 processing and provide a medium quality disc scan and accompanying contact proof sheet at modest extra cost. But with chrome film, all you needed was a good light box.
 
I've always loved reversal film. It's a perfect little work of art in itself. Fun to project, easy to scan. It's a joy to process especially with the Fuji Pro 6 chemistry (the more complicated the better ) I used to make Cibachrome prints, but I have a couple Canon inkjet printers that work great with the occasional enlargement.

Color negative printing would certainly be more fun if Kodak provided cut sheets. I love color printing. I think we have it pretty good considering everything that's happened over the years.
 
Fuji CA papers are available in cut sheet up to 20X24 - good stuff; but their very best papers are available only on big rolls.
 
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