Prints from Ektar and Velvia 50/viewing slides

[rmjranch]

I am shooting both Velvia 50 and Ektar, 35MM, Nikon F5 50mm 1.4. All film is going to "The Darkroom" for developing and printing. It SEEMS that the prints from the Velvia have much better color and more "Life". I always thought that if you wanted prints, as the final product, you were better off with Ektar. Would love to hear other's opinion. Also I view my slides on a light box with a magnifier, both 35mm and 120. Are there any "viewers" that would magnify the slides and strips that are good quality? Can be one for 35mm and one for 120 strips. Thanking you in advance.

 

[Dennis-B]

I hate to resort to "apples and oranges" but that's what you have in this case.

Velvia 50 is a vivid (and a bit green biased) transparency film, while Ektar has a bit of bias (at least to me) on the warm side.

I don't have any transparencies or print film printed commercially. Everything I do is scanned through a Epson V850. The Ektar film requires very little in image correction when I use Affinity or Adobe Elements 2018. As I mentioned earlier, Velvia requires some correction.

A question first, though, on your processing. When you say the Velvia has "better color and more Life", are the Velvia transparencies being scanned by the processor? I've printed Velvia from JPEG provided by the processor, and they were very vivid as I remember seeing Velvia slides on the screen. I rescanned the images on the V850, corrected for the green bias, and the results are more pleasing, a bit more "neutral" in color translation.

Films, when scanned, usually use algorithms based on the type of film (transparency v. negative; Kodak v. Fuji, etc.). It could be that the processor/printer is somewhat biased in the way they interpret the image.

If you could provide a bit more data about how the Velvia was printed, it would be helpful. Also, was the Ektar processed "normally", and printed on standard photographic paper?

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

Velvia requires specialised colourimetric alignment/profiling for printing well, and in this regard machine auto-prints made at a high street lab are not a very good choice for judging anything more than composition and sometimes, exposure (because the machines will tend to correct errors in exposure, and this is the last thing you want). In that regard, all of my RVP/RDPIII production work is commercially scanned for consistency when printing [RA-4 hybridised] — and this is not cheap by any stretch, but it provides for the very best results possible from Velvia and Provia transparency imaging.

Ektar is a print film, while Velvia is a slide/chrome/transparency film. They cannot be compared during printing because, as stated above, Velvia requires more than a straight-through print.

Commercial scanning is far and above what can be achieved by desktop scanners, e.g. the Epson scanners, among others. I do have a V750 but rarely use it other than for digitising old family albums.

Viewing loupés vary from $20 for simple uncorrected plastic affairs to more than $1,200+ for apochromatic jobs that give a very true and correct view of either 35mm or 120, but these big and well-corrected models are chiefly better suited to the larger formats (120 upward) where critical evaluation and assessment free of any and all aberration is required. Nikon make a small 35mm coverage loupé for about $60, but other than that, there are a lot out there worth looking at, but I would steer well clear of cheap and nasty Chinese rubbish.

 

[cooltouch]

I have an old Minolta MC 50mm f/1.7 lens that I use as a loupe. Works great and it's well-corrected, too. I partially dismantled it to remove the aperture stop down lever so as to remove any chance that I might poke myself in the eye with it.

If I want to view my transparencies at greater magnifications, I take one of my 35mm optics and flip it around. I'm not sure what the magnification rate is when I flip around a 35mm lens, but it's pretty decent.

 

[rmjranch]

Sorry my post was not clear. I am looking for a viewer, with a light, to view slides. I have a LED slide viewer SV-3. It magnifies the slides 3 times. Easier to use that taking out the slide projector. Any other suggestions for a slide viewer with a light that might be better?

 

[Dennis-B]

B&H Photo has a number of them.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/.../ci/1560/N/4220238502?origSearch=slide+viewer

 

[etn]

About slide viewers: I am not aware of any 120-format slide viewer (please correct me if I'm wrong). A light box and 3~5x magnifier like the Rodenstock 6x6 listed on this page: http://www.filmscanner.info/en/Lupen.html are the way to go.

Which 120 format are you shooting? The best way to view slides is obviously to project them. Projecting MF slides is an exciting experience which cannot be compared with viewing them on a lightbox. (You will not believe me unless you see it for yourself ha ha, but it's really worth giving it a try.) 6x6 projectors (which incidentally can do 6x4.5) are cheap those days (unless you want a Hasselblad PCP80!) 6x7 projectors are rare and much more expensive. One company in Germany, Goetschmann, still makes some.

 

[Dennis-B]

About slide viewers: I am not aware of any 120-format slide viewer (please correct me if I'm wrong). A light box and 3~5x magnifier like the Rodenstock 6x6 listed on this page: http://www.filmscanner.info/en/Lupen.html are the way to go.

Which 120 format are you shooting? The best way to view slides is obviously to project them. Projecting MF slides is an exciting experience which cannot be compared with viewing them on a lightbox. (You will not believe me unless you see it for yourself ha ha, but it's really worth giving it a try.) 6x6 projectors (which incidentally can do 6x4.5) are cheap those days (unless you want a Hasselblad PCP80!) 6x7 projectors are rare and much more expensive. One company in Germany, Goetschmann, still makes some.

I believe the OP stated he was using 35mm film.

 

[rmjranch]

I shoot both 35mm & 120 slide film. Suggestions for a 120mm Slide film projector please?

 

[DREW WILEY]

Velvia has always been tricky to print well due to its extreme contrast. And now there is no simple way to print color slides in the darkroom at all. Ektar color neg film can be printed using RA4 chem & paper, but you can't evaluate your shots simply by slapping them on a light box. Most labs that do C41 color film processing can provide you with a contact sheet or scan, and this route goes far more smoothly with 120 film than 35mm.

 

[Les Sarile]

I use a Gepe light box and a Carson MV-820 combination 8X/30X loupe/microscope for critical focus verification.

What can be achieved by the Coolscan's 4000dpi res can be verified with this. It's come in handy on a couple of occasions when I scanned some material for others and they complained the scans were out of focus. Never had one with either Coolscan 5000/9000. Of course it's easier to use the full res scans of any film with the Coolscans.

 

[wiltw]

I am shooting both Velvia 50 and Ektar, 35MM, Nikon F5 50mm 1.4. All film is going to "The Darkroom" for developing and printing. It SEEMS that the prints from the Velvia have much better color and more "Life". I always thought that if you wanted prints, as the final product, you were better off with Ektar. Would love to hear other's opinion.

My experience with Velvia 50 from the 1990s is that if your goal was vivid greens and other colors, it was hard to beat making a print on Cibachrome from Velvia. The downsides was that you did not want to use such saturation on portraits because it tended to make for overly ruddy complexion. And for general shots you had to choose wisely to avoid buildup of excessive contrast, or you had to resort to masking.

If you wanted better results for portraiture, you were much wiser to shoot with one of the color neg emulsions. The color was, generally speaking, much less intensely vivid, which is much better suited to portraiture.

 

[trondsi]

I also think my slide prints frequently come out better than color negative. It could be personal preferences of course, but I often (though not always) find that color neg photos look a bit washed out by comparison. Maybe we are just slide people

As far as viewing slides, I have never used a projector myself, but I do have a Pentax 5.5x loupe which is remarkably good. Much better than anything I have ever borrowed in a photo store or from another photographer, but I also have to admit that I have never tried the truly expensive loupes. It also better than the hand held slide viewers I have tried.