Reala, unimpressive colors?

[Roger Cole]

There is no such thing as optical color prints anymore.

Whaaaaaattt?

There most certainly are.

You don't get them as 4x5 or so proofs from commercial processing (most places, don't know if that's true of ALL) but they certainly exist. You can make them yourself and there are still labs will make them for you.

 

[markbarendt]

There is no such thing as optical color prints anymore.

There are at my house.

 

[wblynch]

Evaluation must be done in the reality of the environment.

Sure, 100 people out of hundreds of millions print optical color at home. Or a handful of labs that will charge $20 for a single print.

The reality is optical prints don't exist for real life purposes. There are no new processing systems for optical prints. Even the paper now is designed for digital printing from scans.

We are lucky just to have places to get C-41 developed.

And of course anything seen or shared on this forum or any other is not a live optical print.

I wish optical color prints were still the norm.

 

[Roger Cole]

That is still simply wrong. Not one in at least thousands of people print silver gelatin black and white at home either. Does that mean it doesn't "exist for practical purposes?" You use the little scanned ones for proofs. For display prints you either get those labs to make good optical prints for you (for which $20 is a bargain - I wouldn't make one for you for that, but even when I printed color frequently I did it a few times a month and without a roller transport processor, so if I was that in practice and had the processor to make that very easy and quick, I'd probably do it for the twenty bucks) or you make them yourself. Either way, they certainly exist.

 

[perkeleellinen]

Where I live it's more practical to optically print colour than to go to a lab. And cheaper!

 

[labyrinth photo]

some of us are lucky enough to still make a living out of hand-printing and processig. furthermore we love reala, either pushed or pulled it prints a treat. saying that the kodak portra/ektar and fuji films are great however limited the choice is, it's a case of quality over quantity.

 

[polyglot]

Just because you find it inconvenient to get commercial optical prints doesn't make commercial scan/print output a reference for a film. There is huge flexibility in the interpretation of a negative when scanning and the correctness of the result (in so many dimensions: contrast, gamma, saturation, colour balance in both shadows and highlights, etc) is entirely up to the operator. With that degree of uncontrolled flexibility, you can make any film look like any other film; the nature of the film in question is completely swamped by the stylistic choices and/or incompetence of the scanning operator.

So you can't go saying that you do or don't like a film based on a commercial scan. It's meaningless; all you're saying is that you do or don't like the work of the operator on that day.

If you print optically (and it's really easy to do), you don't have that degree of control. There's density, colour balance and that's it. When printing optically, the true nature of the film comes through and you can make meaningful comparisons on the nature of different films.

 

[markbarendt]

So you can't go saying that you do or don't like a film based on a commercial scan. It's meaningless; all you're saying is that you do or don't like the work of the operator on that day.

+1