Too much yellow on trees...'

foc

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That reminds me of a conversation I had, back in the 1990s, with 2 guys I knew that ran a professional lab. The conversation was about colour correction and customers' (professional photographers) preferences.
They showed me a selection of ring around bull's eye (Shirley prints) they made and sent to a selection of photographers for them to pick the colour they thought was best.

Out of the 15 photographers selected only 3 had picked the NNN or 000 print (the only one with the correct 18% grey colour). The rest varied from +1 yellow to +1 magenta and +1 cyan.

The guys that owned the lab kept these as reference prints for that customer's colour preference and for printing their work.

The moral of the story, one person's cyan is another person's blue.
 
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Kodak Ektar vision…!
 
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After I red that I got the blues…!
 
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Those photos in question no doubt reflect, pun intended, Golden Hour time…!
 

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BM, how about the translation...?
 

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DREW WILEY

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The point is, if you don't learn to make prints yourself, you first need to know exactly what you want, and then find a lab which offers CUSTOM PRINTING you can communicate well with. Yeah, you can keep rolling the dice hoping an automated printing device will land on target once in awhile; but the statistical odds are always against gamblers.

So you not only need a commonality of relevant terminology with any such service, but a commonality of how the end result is assessed. The industry standard has long been 5000K using a high quality light source (which all common inexpensive LED and CFL sources are NOT). You can still have the color balance tweaked to match specific other display lighting circumstances, but need to start at a common denominator point. These are just some of basics. Otherwise, it's the wild West, and anything goes, beyond your control.

And to anyone with a halfway trained eye, whether painter of photographer, or dye or pigment engineer, cyan and blue are totally different animals. You can't even correctly operate a colorhead without recognizing the distinction. Yes, in between that primary and secondary, are all kinds of intermediates. But one should at least learn how to distinguish the main slices of the pie, and when they're on target or not. That what things like high-quality standardized Color Checker Charts are for, along with standardized lighting for evaluation. Take a photo of such a chart under specified Kelvin temp and correct gray scale exposure conditions, submit that, and see how the print compares. Objectivity first saves a lot of headaches subsequently.

[...] superior quality printing has always demanded some extra steps. The only difference these days is that the same kinds of tweaks are now more often done via digital workflow, inheriting many of the same terms including masking, than their direct graphics and darkroom precedents using film-only methods. But both are possible, if not by the photographer themselves, by some service willing to do it for you. But that goes beyond what any mere rote machine sensor and software can do by itself, and will obviously cost more per print too.
 
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foc

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Thank you for showing the backprint on the optically printed prints.

IIRC from what I can read, the 516 88 is the sort/order number, the first N is density (no manual correction), the 1 is a +1 yellow manual correction, and the next N N are magenta, cyan with no manual correction.
The 19 is the automatic density correction the machine applied.

I may have the colours in the wrong order, YMC (above) or CMY depending on the machine used and my memory of over 25+ years. If it is CMY then the manual correction is +1 cyan.

Also, I don't remember the optical printers providing so much info over two lines but I stand to be corrected.
 
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Thanks for the information..,!
 
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HAPPY f/4 Everyone…!
 
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Sounded like the Normandy landings in June of 1944 here! Holy moly.

I needed to take two Advils here.
I live in Wadena Ok, population 75!
Traveled 15 minutes to the big city of Moyers, population 500, for the fireworks display. Seated about 100 yards away from the shooting…!
 
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f=15 in hex. In Europe, your date would have been April 15. That's the date Titanic sunk, of the Hillsborough disaster in the UK and the day Notre Dame in Paris burned down.

 

foc

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I checked out the Blue Moon website and the information about their optical printing. Hats off to them for having such old equipment working so beautifully.

Here is what they say about their optical printers:

Who are Nora and Ray?

Nora and Ray are our beloved optical printing machines! Nora is a Noritsu QSS-2301, she handles our 35mm film and the occasional 120 enlargement. Ray is an old Copal ML300-II and he handles all of our more obscure film formats - Minox, 110, 127, 126 - in addition to 35mm and 120. In collaboration with our talented optical printing technicians, these machines create beautiful, rich, analog prints directly from your negative - there's nothing digital about it!

They must be doing a fantastic job keeping 28+ year old equipment going strong.
 
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It’s actually amazing. I’ve placed the optical prints from Blue Moon in the same album as the scanned prints from Process One. As I flip the pages I’m drawn into the ones from Blue Moon. They seem easier on the eyes and have me study them for longer periods of time. Whilst the scanned prints tend to be a bit more fatigued in quality, I’m not sure why…?
 

koraks

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drawn into

easier on the eyes

have me study them


While all of those qualifications are in a way elegant prose (if you're into that sort of thing), none of it is a useful qualification of technical photographic quality.

So:
I’m not sure why…?

...because it's all subjective unless you compare things systematically and objectively. Lacking such a comparison, it's all...fluffy clouds.
 
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I prefer the artistic approach to film photography not the technical side.
I’m into those qualities that make my life more enjoyable...!
 
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It’s like comparing the sound of CD with vinyl….!
 
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MattKing

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I for one don't doubt that you are happy with your Blue Moon prints, and that seems reasonable.
But I and others don't think you are attributing the quality to the correct factors when you keep referencing their optical workflow.
Their experience and knowledge and skill using legacy equipment - yes.
But the equipment itself - no.
 
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I’m fortunate to be gifted with Ektar f/22 vision, and able to discern the subtleties between scanned and optical prints…!
 

koraks

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Ektar f/22

So diffraction limited, and therefore unable to discern fine detail
Just kidding - I'm sure you can see the difference between those prints. But it says nothing about the inherent characteristics (not even saying 'advantages'!) of digital vs. optical enlargements.
 
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