Why did magazines prefer slides to negatives?

athbr · Apr 13, 2020

Novice question alert.

I have heard magazine publications used to prefer slides to negatives (some even asking for inter-positives from negative images). I have also heard the reason being that slides worked best with offset printing.

Unfortunately most attempts at googling only return information for offset printing in the digital age.

How were analog offset prints created and why were slides more suitable for this?

cheers.

Alan9940 · Apr 13, 2020

No idea for sure since I never worked in the printing industry, but my guess is that negatives leave a lot open to interpretation color-wise. It's very easy to see what the color is on a transparency. I'm sure there are reasons specific to offset printing.

DREW WILEY · Apr 13, 2020

Stock photo editors could just slap a transparency (preferably large format film rather than a tiny slide) right atop a light box and instantly assess what the image was. Then CMYK color separations were made using black and white film in process cameras and screens suitable for offset printing. Later laser scans replaced most copy camera applications. But actual prints from made color negative could also be used. It was an entire major industry, so lots of variations in specific technique.

Konical · Apr 13, 2020

Good Afternoon, Athbr,

I don't know the technical reason(s), but I'm sure that someone here will be able to answer that question. Every step between an original and the ultimate result normally involves in some degradation, so that's probably a factor. In addition, once the idea of working from slides became standard in the publishing industry, that practice would feed on itself and be difficult to fight.
Interestingly, when I was a high school yearbook advisor, I learned that the usual practice in that industry was to use prints when color was involved. Again, I have no idea why, but I'll bet some APUGer does.

Konical

Pieter12 · Apr 13, 2020

First, unless proof prints accompany a submission, negatives need to be printed to show the intention of the photographer. The editor will not be able to judge the image(s) and be able to make a selection from just negatives. Slides can be easily inspected on a lightbox with a loupe. Also, slides have a much larger dynamic range and can have more saturated and/or truer color.

MattKing · Apr 13, 2020

Pretend for a moment that you are an editor with National Geographic. Your photographers - both staff and freelance - are sending you hundreds or thousands of photos each week, from which you need to choose a very, very few to go into your magazine.
Nothing is as fast to evaluate as a backlit slide, using a loupe.
Fun fact - National Geographic has its own Kodak processing line for Kodachrome. At one time it had the highest volume of 35mm still Kodachrome of any lab in the world.

Pieter12 · Apr 13, 2020

Another factor for magazines is (was) speed of delivery: reversal film just needs to be processed and is ready to use as is. If the film shot is 35mm, mounting is unnecessary as mounted slides are removed from their mounts for reproduction anyway.

athbr · Apr 13, 2020

Would they have to do an interpositive of a negative to get it printed or could you do offset straight from a negative?

Does anyone know when this became the norm?

I'm curious how photojournalists who shot black and white print film adapted to these changes.

MattKing · Apr 13, 2020

We worked with black and white prints when I did newspaper work.
I never did magazine work.

athbr · Apr 13, 2020

MattKing said:
We worked with black and white prints when I did newspaper work.
I never did magazine work.

How did they get the image on the newspaper?

Pieter12 · Apr 13, 2020

athbr said:
Would they have to do an interpositive of a negative to get it printed or could you do offset straight from a negative?

Does anyone know when this became the norm?

I'm curious how photojournalists who shot black and white print film adapted to these changes.

A print from a negative would suffice. It could be shot with a process camera, flatbed scanner or if flexible and not too large, wrapped around a drum scanner. Black & white prints are treated the same way. I believe this was pretty much the norm until digital photography became prevalent (late 90s or early 00s?)--it became popular for journalism because of the immediacy, speed and ease of transmitting images.

MattKing · Apr 13, 2020

athbr said:
How did they get the image on the newspaper?

Half-tone screens, prepared using process cameras - something like this:

The half-tone screens are then stripped into the text containing lithographers' film which is then used to "burn" plates - at least with offset based printing.
I used a vertical version of that camera to prepare the half-tone negatives for the books and brochures I worked on during my early experiences in a print shop.
I still have copies of a couple of the books that I put together - including actually doing the offset press work.

jtk · Apr 13, 2020

athbr said:
Would they have to do an interpositive of a negative to get it printed or could you do offset straight from a negative?

Does anyone know when this became the norm?

I'm curious how photojournalists who shot black and white print film adapted to these changes.

Those weren't "changes," they were quality standards.

B&W prints are far easier to reproduce for journalism purposes than are color images.

jtk · Apr 13, 2020

Pieter12 said:
A print from a negative would suffice. It could be shot with a process camera, flatbed scanner or if flexible and not too large, wrapped around a drum scanner. Black & white prints are treated the same way. I believe this was pretty much the norm until digital photography became prevalent (late 90s or early 00s?)--it became popular for journalism because of the immediacy, speed and ease of transmitting images.

Scanners were relied upon by famous photographers. such as Ansel Adams...who presonally operated a Helle (Hell?) scanner and reportedly loved it.

Few lithographers had the equipment, not to mention the training, to make color separations so for a loooong time, almost all of them sent the film away to a company who would make the seps for them. Most small lithographes, like newspapers (remember them?) had cameras that could do the job, back when small lithographers actually existed.

Pieter12 · Apr 13, 2020

jtk said:
Scanners were relied upon by famous photographers. such as Ansel Adams...who presonally operated a Helle (Hell?) scanner and reportedly loved it.

Few lithographers had the equipment, not to mention the training, to make color separations so for a loooong time, almost all of them sent the film away to a company who would make the seps for them. Most small lithographes, like newspapers (remember them?) had cameras that could do the job, back when small lithographers actually existed.

Most newspapers only ran special color sections that would usually be printed off-site and ahead of time--Sunday magazines, color comics sections, ad supplements. Color only started to become prevalent in newspapers with thee advent of USA Today in the 80's. Newspapers are a product that is created and manufactured in a very short time frame, there is not a lot of leeway for things like critical color reproduction. Many newspapers were printed by offset letterpress and running 4-color images is not really feasible.

athbr · Apr 13, 2020

MattKing said:
Half-tone screens, prepared using process cameras - something like this:

The half-tone screens are then stripped into the text containing lithographers' film which is then used to "burn" plates - at least with offset based printing.
I used a vertical version of that camera to prepare the half-tone negatives for the books and brochures I worked on during my early experiences in a print shop.
I still have copies of a couple of the books that I put together - including actually doing the offset press work.

I was born in the digital age so this kind of stuff always amazes me. I'd imagine you needed some talented technicians working for these publications to get good results.

Thanks for sharing.

TheFlyingCamera · Apr 13, 2020

Also, part of the factor for magazine repro work was that you had a "correct" example to repro from, so doing the layout and printing was easy - all you had to do was look at the original to see if the red on the page matched the red of the dress/shoes/jacket/whatever. With a negative, you could have multiple rounds of color matching without knowing if it was right or not.

Pieter12 · Apr 13, 2020

athbr said:
I was born in the digital age so this kind of stuff always amazes me. I'd imagine you needed some talented technicians working for these publications to get good results.

Thanks for sharing.

For black & white newspaper work, the photographer (or the newspaper photo lab) would deliver a flat image--that is, not too contrasty--for reproduction. The image would gain density on the press. A Velox (a halftone-screened positive print) was used in the paste-up of the newspaper pages, no stripping would be necessary to prepare the plate. In newspaper work, expediency was key.

DREW WILEY · Apr 13, 2020

Newspaper shots could be technically abominable to begin with because the quality of the output itself didn't matter much. I took an 8 second long handheld 35mm shot of a car accident at night that got published in the paper. Nobody knew the difference. On the other hand, I expect my personal darkroom prints to be significantly better than magazine standards. All kinds of things could be done by skilled pre-press technicians. That was an entire job category unto itself : pre-press, and it applied to everything from needing results almost immediately, like for a daily newspaper, to very high-quality art folios and coffee table books at the other extreme, which might take many months to prepare. Prior to scanners, black and white prints generally had to be somewhat lower contrast than prints intended for framed fine art purposes. Lots of Ansel Adams repro prints still survive. They aren't worth much because they were rather bland and intended as just a step in the path, with a book or postcard as the end result. He didn't do any of his own pre-press work, nor did he operate a scanner. In terms of color work, a film color original was expected to be within printable contrast range. If it was too contrasty, it might get rejected for being too difficult. Pro studio and stock photographers understood these issues; otherwise, they wouldn't get paid. It wasn't like today when people just grab a roll of something like Velvia and then hope to make something out of it by torturing it in Photoshop afterwards.

MattKing · Apr 13, 2020

Pieter12 said:
A Velox (a halftone-screened positive print) was used in the paste-up of the newspaper pages, no stripping would be necessary to prepare the plate. In newspaper work, expediency was key.

Both this approach and the process I referred to were used - it depended on the printer, the size of the press run and the people involved.
Pieter12's description was probably more common with mid-size press runs.
I actually worked for a short while for a newspaper that used hot lead presses - historically that was how the big newspapers were printed, and the technicalities of how they got photos into them were different again.

Luckless · Apr 13, 2020

Does anyone happen to know of a good "History of Newspaper/Magazine" printing book? Ideally something that offers a reasonably light-reading subject overview, but with enough technical meat left in to get a decent understanding of how to start the basics of different processes?

DREW WILEY · Apr 13, 2020

Old graphics art manuals can often be found in used bookstores, including the Kodak series. These can be a lot of fun to read.

cmacd123 · Apr 13, 2020

I also vaguely recall that Reversal tended to have smaller grain than the negative process.

DREW WILEY · Apr 13, 2020

Grain size had very little significance back when most pros shot fairly large format anyway. In quite a few cases, the pictures in the magazines were smaller than the originals! An exception would be black and white 35mm journalistic photos, where grain was often obvious.

removed account4 · Apr 13, 2020

hi op
it is prolly for the same reason that they wanted 5x7 or 8x10 glossies, so when they did the reproduction work
or the cmyk separations they didnt'need to deal with interpretation of the negative.. basically today, a digital file is what the chrome is now and no color separations are required, it would help though because no one's monitors are ever the same, they drift so something might look perfect on my screen but on yours or whoever's it looks dark or magenta or whatever. .. not sure how old you are, but when i was a college student i did paste up work for the newspaper and it was all the printed stories that went through this waxer so they could be stuck to a stat board. .. something magical happened after that and the paper was spit out of the press. used to love putting nonsensical dadaist code messages in the classifides

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