Why did magazines prefer slides to negatives?

Agulliver · Apr 22, 2020

Interesting thread......22 years ago when I was living in Boise (USA) I photographed a local vintage/classic car event as was/is my habit on C41 CN film. A few days later I noticed that a print publication was asking if anyone had photos of this event to sell, slides only. I contacted them but they were insistent on slides only - their given reason was that CN film was "amateur" and the quality wasn't sufficient. I explained that I'd been using an SLR and Kodak professional film but they weren't interested at all and were quite dismissive.

I can more easily understand preferring slide film as they can stick it on a light box and instantly see what they've got. That makes perfect sense. Also I assume that back then any scanning/reproducing equipment would have been designed and set up for slide film and not negative film....it wasn't like today when everyone and his dog can access a film scanner capable of scanning both negs and reversal film.

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

Your experience shows one the myths about photography that persists to this day. I would have asked the person why then, Hollywood has always used negative film and not reversal film.

Photo Engineer has pointed out that quality color from slides when printed in magazines is only achieved by masks that must be made to correct color due to dye impurities which show up when printed. A negative has the masking already built in to correct for these impurities. A slide printed without this masking done would therefore have inferior color to a negative print. The high contrast of a slide must also be compensated.

The same is true in the darkroom. Prints from slides without masks made for correction tend to have noticeably high contrast and color not as accurate as prints made from negatives, although the look is acceptable and sometimes preferred by many. Technically, however, prints from negatives are superior.

jmdavis · Apr 22, 2020

We used slides because they were quick to evaluate on the light table and it was how separation houses were set up. We were drum scanning slides and transparencies when I started in 1990.

We certainly could and did use prints for some things but never for covers or major 4 color ads.

I should also note that for magazine usage at 133 or even a 200 line screen, 35mm and 120 slides were fine for quality but 4x5s were easier to judge.

DREW WILEY · Apr 22, 2020

RPC - you're incorrectly assigning mask application. It is actually an entire skill suite once used by both pre-press and photo printing applications. I use variations of it even to correct idiosyncrasies in color negs which the native orange mask does not. No film is perfect, and making broad generalizations about entire categories allegedly being "better" than others, ala chrome vs CN, is basically nonsense. It all depends on the specifics.

jtk · Apr 22, 2020

RPC said:
Your experience shows one the myths about photography that persists to this day. I would have asked the person why then, Hollywood has always used negative film and not reversal film.

Photo Engineer has pointed out that quality color from slides when printed in magazines is only achieved by masks that must be made to correct color due to dye impurities which show up when printed. A negative has the masking already built in to correct for these impurities. A slide printed without this masking done would therefore have inferior color to a negative print. The high contrast of a slide must also be compensated.

The same is true in the darkroom. Prints from slides without masks made for correction tend to have noticeably high contrast and color not as accurate as prints made from negatives, although the look is acceptable and sometimes preferred by many. Technically, however, prints from negatives are superior.

"Hollywood" did use Ektachrome back into the 50s. I've seen original 8X10 movie star chrome portraits and I've duplicated original 4X5 Ektachrome E2 (that's E TWO) that was used for Arizona Highways Magazine. As well, masks weren't necessary or even used once scanners were perfected (early 80s).

Properly processed chromes don't have "impurities" and I doubt the famous and deceased PE claimed they do.. In particular, those of us who have used both negs and transparencies...and personally processed them...would have rarely used C22, except for weddings and studio portraits etc) when good E4 and E6 processing was available.

jtk · Apr 22, 2020

RPC said:
Your experience shows one the myths about photography that persists to this day. I would have asked the person why then, Hollywood has always used negative film and not reversal film.

Photo Engineer has pointed out that quality color from slides when printed in magazines is only achieved by masks that must be made to correct color due to dye impurities which show up when printed. A negative has the masking already built in to correct for these impurities. A slide printed without this masking done would therefore have inferior color to a negative print. The high contrast of a slide must also be compensated.

The same is true in the darkroom. Prints from slides without masks made for correction tend to have noticeably high contrast and color not as accurate as prints made from negatives, although the look is acceptable and sometimes preferred by many. Technically, however, prints from negatives are superior.

I think it's better to write from one's own experience, rather than inventing things a deceased person has allegedly pointed out online.

btaylor · Apr 22, 2020

Hollywood (movies) used color negative because of the increase in contrast that occurred with each generation of duplication that was required to get to a projection print from the camera original. There was one low contrast reversal film made for duplication that was used in 16mm when limited prints would be struck.

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

DREW WILEY said:
RPC - you're incorrectly assigning mask application. It is actually an entire skill suite once used by both pre-press and photo printing applications. I use variations of it even to correct idiosyncrasies in color negs which the native orange mask does not. No film is perfect, and making broad generalizations about entire categories allegedly being "better" than others, ala chrome vs CN, is basically nonsense. It all depends on the specifics.

The orange mask in CN film definitely does correct color deficiencies that is not corrected in slides. Masks can be and are created to correct these deficiencies for slides for printing. You may make masks even for CN but it is generally not necessary. With slides it makes a much bigger difference in color quality.

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

jtk said:
"Hollywood" did use Ektachrome back into the 50s. I've seen original 8X10 movie star chrome portraits and I've duplicated original 4X5 Ektachrome E2 (that's E TWO) that was used for Arizona Highways Magazine. As well, masks weren't necessary or even used once scanners were perfected (early 80s).

Properly processed chromes don't have "impurities" and I doubt the famous and deceased PE claimed they do.. In particular, those of us who have used both negs and transparencies...and personally processed them...would have rarely used C22, except for weddings and studio portraits etc) when good E4 and E6 processing was available.

All photographic dyes have impurities, even those in slides, but they aren't that obvious until printed, because you are then seeing the impurities in both the slide and the print medium. The primary purpose of the orange mask is to cancel them to a large degree, giving the advantage of negs over slides in print quality. PE talked about this on many occasions and it agrees with much I have read elsewhere. PE's posts are all archived and I suggest you study them before making your claims.

When I mentioned Hollywood I was referring to movies not magazines.

GarageBoy · Apr 22, 2020

Photo Engineer said:
Generally, people like looking at slides, as the tone scale of a paper print severly restricts the ability of the 'system' to appear to reproduce the original as well as a slide, not that the slide is tecnhically superior. Demostrations of prints, illuminated with high intensity lights next to slides projected on a screen illustrate this well showing that the print is as good or better than the projected slide.

PE

Canon at their photo plus expo had these aspheric focuses spot lights to light their display prints - first time I saw them, I honestly thought they were projected

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

jtk said:
I think it's better to write from one's own experience, rather than inventing things a deceased person has allegedly pointed out online.

Although I have not made masks. I have printed both negatives and slides and the color quality difference I saw paralled everything I ever heard or read about dye impurities and the reason they are masked in negatives.

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

btaylor said:
Hollywood (movies) used color negative because of the increase in contrast that occurred with each generation of duplication that was required to get to a projection print from the camera original. There was one low contrast reversal film made for duplication that was used in 16mm when limited prints would be struck.

Color quality degrades upon duplication but is virtually eliminated when proper color correction masking is built in as in negative film. Contrast is controlled by the specific material used.

DREW WILEY · Apr 22, 2020

Well, I've made thousands of masks, all kinds of them for various color as well as black and white printing and duplication applications. Based on that fact, not all opinions are equal. You clearly have never made serious dupes or internegs either. I have. Just finished a whole stack of em on 8x10 film. For garden-variety commercial applications, the basic orange mask on CN film does what it is supposed to. But once you need to elevate the color reproduction to a higher standard, something supplemental is often needed. Or there may be contrast refinements in mind. Most CN films have serious color issues because a priority is put on stereotypical skintones as well as exposure latitude, not on full spectral purity. Chromes have a different set of issues. Either way, supplementary masking can often help.

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

Here is PE's entire post of the one quoted by GarageBoy above. It is quite informative.

hpulley said: ↑

But you can make Ciba/Ilfochrome images of slides printed onto paper too.

[PE's reply:]

Straight Ilfochrome prints are generally not as high in quality as straight neg-pos prints. You have to use contrast and color masking to give high quality pos-pos prints, and even these suffer some degradation.

So, to the OP.

Color prints from negatives are contrast adjusted and color masked from the start due to the orange mask. The films generally have finer grain (cf Ektar) and often are sharper. Color fidelity is high rather than exaggerated but you can find color negative films with high color saturation (cf the Gold family or the VC and UC films of the past).

Printing pos-pos introduces inevitable reproduction errors as you are printing the toe on the toe and the shoulder on the shoulder which causes contrast errors. With neg-pos printing, you are printing a straight line onto a curve.
It is for these reasons that motion pictures today are made using neg-pos systems. Color fidelity, good grain and sharpness, and good printability.

Having made dozens of comparisons of just this sort, I can say that a good neg-pos print illuminated properly and shown next to a projected slide of the same subject will show about the same overall quality. This is due to the restricted tonal range of the paper print. If you project a slide next to a neg-pos transparency, the neg-pos will win hands down due to the huge tonal range and high overall quality.

Most people never do this sort of comparison.

In the end though, no matter what the original material, people love saturated garish colors and rather high contrast given a range of choices!
PE

Here is the entire thread:

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/comparing-results-from-color-print-vs-slide-film.70120/

jtk · Apr 22, 2020

Amusingly this thread has been hijacked to talk about the realities of motion pictures (shot usually on negative film) in order to generalize mistakenly about Hollywood's still photography.

As well there's the other distraction about Ciba...entirely irrelevant.

fwiw dye transfer prints were usually made from chromes, not negatives. Nobody shot still photos with negative film except for school portraits, weddings etc... Hollywood shot chromes (and tricolor) for their portraits.

The beloved AA didn't shoot negative color....but he did learn how color separation worked from positives..

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

Oops! GarageBoy's quote is not from the above post but similar.

DREW WILEY · Apr 22, 2020

Go master color both CN as well as chrome printing yourself and then chime in, maybe after 30 yrs of actual experience. Sidewalk supervisors don't impress me.

RPC · Apr 22, 2020

By the same token, get someone with PE's experience and knowledge to refute what he has said.

jtk · Apr 22, 2020

RPC said:
Oops! GarageBoy's quote is not from the above post but similar.

Also, I don't think PE knew how "most people" viewed prints...unless he was talking about the dear departed Kodak's idea of "most people"...which doomed them.

DREW WILEY · Apr 22, 2020

AA never did color separation work. He no doubt saw some of his pals and neighbors like Phillip Hyde or Cole Weston doing it for sake of DT printing. Dennis Brokaw lived there too, who wrote Kodak's last DT manual. But AA himself barely understood even basic masking. He farmed out his very limited color shots for printing, wasn't very comfortable with color in general.

DREW WILEY · Apr 22, 2020

RPC - I've had numerous conversations with Ron (PE) outside this forum which you wouldn't even begin to understand. Great guy, but certainly not an expert on everything. He had been quite involved in R&D tweaks of CN film at Kodak. Ciba direct positive was the enemy. But if it was so awful, why was Kodak attempting to produce their own competing version of a dye-destruction process? The market demand was huge; and the previous Type R process faded quickly. So at that point in history, there were two premium color processes - dye transfer and Ciba, and both required quite a bit of masking to do well. Çhromogenic prints were simpler to make, but that doesn't preclude the fact that they too could often be improved with supplementary masking. Even the old Kodak color printing guides said that. People just didn't bother, or they'd have to charge way more for those kinds of prints too.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 22, 2020

RPC said:
Your experience shows one the myths about photography that persists to this day. I would have asked the person why then, Hollywood has always used negative film and not reversal film.

Photo Engineer has pointed out that quality color from slides when printed in magazines is only achieved by masks that must be made to correct color due to dye impurities which show up when printed. A negative has the masking already built in to correct for these impurities. A slide printed without this masking done would therefore have inferior color to a negative print. The high contrast of a slide must also be compensated.

The same is true in the darkroom. Prints from slides without masks made for correction tend to have noticeably high contrast and color not as accurate as prints made from negatives, although the look is acceptable and sometimes preferred by many. Technically, however, prints from negatives are superior.

How do they rate digital prints from positives vs.negatives by scanning first? What are the pros and cons of this process?

DREW WILEY · Apr 22, 2020

Just depends on the quality of the scan, meaning both the seriousness of the scanner, the software involved, and the skill of its operator. But specific questions would be better served on the Hybrid portion of the forum. Regardless, you're bottlenecked by the parameters of digital printing itself.

btaylor · Apr 23, 2020

RPC said:
Contrast is controlled by the specific material used.

Yes. Which is why reversal films were not used- contrast is too high.

RPC · Apr 23, 2020

DREW WILEY said:
RPC - I've had numerous conversations with Ron (PE) outside this forum which you wouldn't even begin to understand. Great guy, but certainly not an expert on everything. He had been quite involved in R&D tweaks of CN film at Kodak. Ciba direct positive was the enemy. But if it was so awful, why was Kodak attempting to produce their own competing version of a dye-destruction process? The market demand was huge; and the previous Type R process faded quickly. So at that point in history, there were two premium color processes - dye transfer and Ciba, and both required quite a bit of masking to do well. Çhromogenic prints were simpler to make, but that doesn't preclude the fact that they too could often be improved with supplementary masking. Even the old Kodak color printing guides said that. People just didn't bother, or they'd have to charge way more for those kinds of prints too.

I started printing color negatives, and slides w/Cibachrome in the mid-80s. I had learned about the dye impurity problem, and how color negative masking works, back then in several publications I read, one of them being a book about Cibachrome printing. It explained about slides not being masked, and that it presented problems for printing from them in color and contrast, why that was, and how the Cibachrome print material manufacturers had tried to deal (not completely successfully} with it. So I was aware of such issues long before I ever heard of PE.

When I read PE's posts it only reinforced what I had already known for years. What I saw in my prints also corroborated what I had learned and I decided not to stick with shooting and printing only from slides as the color and contrast simply did not match the accuracy I got with printing from negatives, and I did not want to deal with creating my own masks.

One thing I wish I had realized back then, that PE has revealed in his posts, was the high quality level that can be achieved from printing negatives onto print film. I would have loved to have printed my medium format negatives onto print film and produced slides as well as prints, and projected the slides. I can only try to imagine the awesome quality resulting.

Why did magazines prefer slides to negatives?

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