Why did studio photographers use slide film back in the day?

Dazzer123 said:

Perhaps silly question: is there no way to optically view a negative with the correct colors, other than be printing through color filters in an enlarger? (i'm talking pre-digital)

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the movie folks had the Special Hazeltine made TV scanner that let the lab folks select the Printer settings ("Printer Lights") by scanning the negative. the Unit displayed the image on a 21 inch round colour TV CRT.

the slide films were also of much better grain and so on compared to the colour Negative films of the day.

Color photography for print reproduction was done on slide film. There was the convenience factor of not needing proof sheets to evaluate the work. But more than that was the (comparative) ease of making color separations for offset printing.

High-street portrait photographers used color negative for their work.

It is the publication media that dictates the technology.

As said above, in the heyday of color film, the film used depended on the intended use and reproduction medium. Studio photographers shooting for art directors and eventual magazine / printing press reproduction (where a color reference is desirable so the printer knows what it should look like) used color slides.

Wedding and portrait photographers whose end products was photographic prints for clients (often multiple copies) used color negative film. Also, at weddings etc the lighting was less controlled than a studio and the latitude of color negative would have been helpful.

I don't know when Kodak and Fuji introduced "professional" lines of color negative film (the lineages that evolved into VPS, Portra, etc) but it was well after Kodachrome and I believe Ektachrome. Color slide film was seen as a premium and more accurate product than consumer color negative film.

reddesert said:

I don't know when Kodak and Fuji introduced "professional" lines of color negative film (the lineages that evolved into VPS, Portra, etc) but it was well after Kodachrome and I believe Ektachrome. Color slide film was seen as a premium and more accurate product than consumer color negative film.

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For Kodak, the "Professional" designation came from the difference in distribution systems, plus to a certain extent differences in shipping/storage methods. Eastman Kodak and its many international subsidiaries tended to run their own distribution systems, and they had different product lines and catalogues for the camera store market, the drug/grocery/tourist market and the commercial/technical/professional/institutional market.
If you were at the retail/end user end of any of those markets - e.g. a camera store - you would have one catalogue. If you were at the end of another market - say a high volume portrait business - you would have another catalogue. Generally speaking you weren't able to order something that was in a different market segment's catalogue, although there lots of products listed in multiple catalogues.
The camera store catalogue often had product that was "Professional" - bought mostly by the commercial market people - as well as "amateur" - sold in highest volume through the drug store/grocery store/tourist market.
The badging and advertising was also different between the markets, and the "Professional" badged film tended to be advertised separate from the "amateur" film.
With the collapse of the in-house distribution systems, the separate designations began making less and less sense.
The only remnant is that a couple of films are pitched more at the "grocery store" market, and tend to be mostly sold through third party distributors who sell into those markets. All of the rest of the still films are now in the "Professional" category.

When I joined Photrio I think the first thread I posted was the question: why do slide films deliver finer grain than a color negative film of comparable speed?

Nearly all answers fell into these two buckets:

1. They don't. Provia 100 and E100 aren't finer grained than Ektar.
2. We don't know whether it's true.

And yet again... I see several claims that slides are finer grained.

Steven Lee said:

When I joined Photrio I think the first thread I posted was the question: why do slide films deliver finer grain than a color negative film of comparable speed?

Nearly all answers fell into these two buckets:

1. They don't. Provia 100 and E100 aren't finer grained than Ektar.
2. We don't know whether it's true.

And yet again... I see several claims that slides are finer grained.

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Whats funny is that high speed slide films, ISO-400 and above were always a lot grainier than color print films of the same speeds. Even Kodachrome 200 was a grainy film.

Steven Lee said:

When I joined Photrio I think the first thread I posted was the question: why do slide films deliver finer grain than a color negative film of comparable speed?

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If it's this thread you mean: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threa...sources-on-e-6-process-and-slide-film.195404/
The only one who said something about your question on grain made a comparison between old slide film and modern C41 film. It doesn't really go in the direction of the summary you have above.

This is not to nitpick, but your summary just didn't match my own experience at all. Back in the 1990s, our family switched from shooting slides to color negative because ...well, long story, but we wanted prints. Immediately, everything went grainy as heck. We used to project slides a couple of ft. across without very apparent grain and now we were looking at 5x7" prints that were decidedly grainy.

So maybe my memory is somehow tainted. Although when scanning the family archives a few years ago, I had the same experience revisiting those same images. And when I got back into film at any meaningful scale around 2003-ish, I again had the same experience comparing e.g. Sensia 100 and Sensia 200 to e.g. NPS160.

I don't think I ever attempted to track down the datasheets of the films that form the basis of the memories/experiences above in an attempt to compare RMS granularity specs. But the pattern for me was quite clear. Was/am I wrong? Maybe...?

By means of illustration - not that it's a scientific proof or anything, but still:

Sensia 200


Fuji NPS160


Same scanner, both 3200dpi 100% crops, no sharpening or noise reduction applied, no in-scanner grain reduction, smoothing or ICE.

chriscrawfordphoto said:

Whats funny is that high speed slide films, ISO-400 and above were always a lot grainier than color print films of the same speeds.

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I dunno about that.

Sensia 1600, pushed to 3200:


Fuji 400 color negative (rebranded for a local retail store):

(2004)


(1998)

Sensia 400:


Ektachrome 400:


All examples exposed in 2004 (exception noted), on freshly purchased film, lab-developed and scanned on the same scanner.

Some say Fujichrome 400X beats all ISO 400 color films: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/rollei-rpx-25-grain-and-resolution.115244/page-2#post-1523247

koraks said:

If it's this thread you mean: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threa...sources-on-e-6-process-and-slide-film.195404/
The only one who said something about your question on grain made a comparison between old slide film and modern C41 film. It doesn't really go in the direction of the summary you have above.

This is not to nitpick, but your summary just didn't match my own experience at all. Back in the 1990s, our family switched from shooting slides to color negative because ...well, long story, but we wanted prints. Immediately, everything went grainy as heck. We used to project slides a couple of ft. across without very apparent grain and now we were looking at 5x7" prints that were decidedly grainy.

So maybe my memory is somehow tainted. Although when scanning the family archives a few years ago, I had the same experience revisiting those same images. And when I got back into film at any meaningful scale around 2003-ish, I again had the same experience comparing e.g. Sensia 100 and Sensia 200 to e.g. NPS160.

I don't think I ever attempted to track down the datasheets of the films that form the basis of the memories/experiences above in an attempt to compare RMS granularity specs. But the pattern for me was quite clear. Was/am I wrong? Maybe...?

By means of illustration - not that it's a scientific proof or anything, but still:

Sensia 200
View attachment 354226

Fuji NPS160
View attachment 354227

Same scanner, both 3200dpi 100% crops, no sharpening or noise reduction applied, no in-scanner grain reduction, smoothing or ICE.



I dunno about that.

Sensia 1600, pushed to 3200:
View attachment 354228

Fuji 400 color negative (rebranded for a local retail store):
View attachment 354231

Sensia 400:
View attachment 354232

All examples exposed in 2004, on freshly purchased film, lab-developed and scanned on the same scanner.

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Those slide scans, except for the 1600 one, are out of focus, the grain is not sharp in them.

Velvia 100F


Sensia 100


I'd have to look up some ProImage 100 negatives to make a comparison with the 100 speed slide film above, but frankly, I can already see where this is going...

chriscrawfordphoto said:

Those slide scans, except for the 1600 one, are out of focus, the grain is not sharp in them.

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All the same scanner. If the slide scans were affected, the negative scans would be, too. The 1600 also is not a sharper scan than any of the others. That scanner has performed very consistently for 20 years now...

The negative film is just consistently grainier.

Don't get me wrong; I understand the desire to put it down to a methodological issue. As I said, it's not a scientific proof I'm offering. I recounted my experiences over the years and figured I could perhaps see if I could find some illustration in my scanned archives, and it just turns out that everything I pull up just matches how I remembered it. I literally just opened some random folders on my hard drive and clicked random scans of similar-speed films. I'm not even cherry picking.

PS: this is from one of those slide scans above; the Sensia 200 scan in the first example:


This is from the Fuji 400 print film:


They're really both as much in or out of focus, depending on how you want to define it. Raw scans generally look kind of soft. Again, the pattern is consistent. It's not some focus issue.

@koraks Sorry I did not mean to imply that your experience could be dismissed. Personally I can't even have an opinion because I've never used C-41 and E-6 side by side. When I was shooting slides, I wasn't into CN and I ended up losing my old collection of slides while moving a while ago. And these days I don't shoot slides much at all. So I could never compare them.

But I wondered, from the technology perspective, what is it in the E-6 process/emulsion structure that gives it a fundamental granularity advantage? Still haven't heard an answer. It could just be a coincidence that newer manufacturing techniques were adopted by slide films first?

Steven Lee said:

Sorry I did not mean to imply that your experience could be dismissed.

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Sorry from my end for making it seem that way; that was certainly not my intention!

Steven Lee said:

But I wondered, from the technology perspective, what is it in the E-6 process/emulsion structure that gives it a fundamental granularity advantage?

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I really don't know. The answer you got from @Rudeofus in the other thread may have something to do with it, with slide film being inherently higher in contrast, while color negative is designed to have image contrast boosted in the printing or scanning stage. The latter results in a poorer s/n ratio. But why slide film doesn't end up being grainier in the first place, I really don't know. If the contrast explanation is really the reason, it makes one wonder why color negative wasn't designed to have a higher gamma in the first place to overcome this problem. Maybe this resulted in color crossover problems? I just don't know.

Steven Lee said:

It could just be a coincidence that newer manufacturing techniques were adopted by slide films first?

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Who knows, but by the 1980s, color negative was a pretty serious medium and technological advances seem to have been pretty rapid in that field. I can't imagine CN lagging far behind E6 technologyl-wise at that stage. There's probably something more fundamental going on.

I have not read a lot of the responses but I can say for certain Photographers would use Large Fromat Trans to shoot to actual page layout side and this sized Trans would be emulsion strip lifted and put in
place by hand , very detailed work , emulsion stripping was a trade that required great hand eye coordination. Transparency film was easier for scanner operators to balance too, as well as mention, layout designers
could lay out the images on a large light table to decide on what to use and where.

Carnie Bob said:

Emulsion stripping was a trade that required great hand eye coordination.

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Could you explain what emulsion stripping is and why it would need to be done?

Steven Lee said:

But I wondered, from the technology perspective, what is it in the E-6 process/emulsion structure that gives it a fundamental granularity advantage?

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Just musing here.
Given that what we see as grain is essentially the space between grains, perhaps your answer comes from the fact that what you see in a developed transparency is a developed out image of the space between the original image bearing silver halides..
As the transparency film speed goes up, the size of the initially exposed grains goes up, and the size of the not initially developed "holes" between those initially exposed grains goes down.
When you develop the transparency film, you end up with the initially exposed grains gone, and the remaining grains left, forming your image.
With negative film, it is the dye clouds that correspond to the initially exposed grains that end up staying in the developed negative. The higher the speed of the film, the larger the dye clouds that remain.

I think the perceived graininess of slide vs negative film probably has something to do with whether you're seeing grain (or its descendant dye clouds) structure in the highlights vs in the shadows, but I also think the issue has to do with old lore vs current measurements. A lot of photography ideas like color slide vs negative graininess probably got laid down in the 60s-70s, when fairly slow slide film really was the professional tool, and it probably was less grainy and greater color fidelity than the contemporary color negative film. Jump forward a few decades, and I think the manufacturers invested a lot of resources into developing better color negative film, as mentioned above. So if we compare say 100-speed slide and negative film of the 90s-2000s, we may see much less of a difference.

Another thing to consider is that Profesional Photographers were ofteh NOT the "first" market.

Ektachrome was really "pushed" as a military product where the pictures could be developed much quicker than sending the film to Harow or Rochester, and only folks sworn to secrecy would ever need to see the film.

the colour negative "Push' was motion pictures where 500 prints might be needed and Kodak wanted a process that did not require thee strips of Camera Negative and that also did not require the participation of Technicolor.

reddesert said:

I don't know when Kodak and Fuji introduced "professional" lines of color negative film (the lineages that evolved into VPS, Portra, etc)

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In the late 1960s, still a kid, I was shooting weddings for a local guy. Shooting 120 roll film thru a tlr (typically a Mamiya C2 or C3). Film was Kodak CPS (professional color neg); I think it was perhaps Ektacolor something or other; type S ('S' meant short exposure, less than 1/10 second, as I recall. ). (All of this stuff is handled by pro-labs; no other way to get high quality color prints.)

Not too much later I spent a few years pushing around long-roll portrait cameras doing high-volume portrait work for a large chain outfit. Still the same professional film, Kodak CPS, but in 100 ft rolls, 70mm unperforated.

This remained the standard portrait/wedding professional neg film until the C-41 process came into general use, along with VPSII film.

One of the advantages of using transparency film, was colour accuracy. We did a real lot of product photography, 14 studios with often two photographers per studio, going hammer and tongs day in day out.

The film we used almost exclusively was Kodak EPN, which if my memory is correct, was designed to render colour as the human eye sees it. Most of our film was with medium format cameras, Hasselblad, Mamiya RB67 and eventually and thankfully Mamiya RZ67 with motor drive.

Apart from the fact the negative size was slightly different between the Hasselblad and Mamiya systems, 6x6 versus 6x7, there was a distinct contrast difference between the two manufacturers. The Mamiya lenses were slightly contrastier than the Hasselblad and dependent upon the product being photographed, the camera system lenses could be the decider of which one was to be used.

It was fairly common to use the flatter Hasselblad lenses to photograph fluffy white towels using a three and a half stop highlight to shadow subject brightness range. The exposure used was designed to make the transparency slightly too dark, then we would develop the film with a half stop push process to give a contrast kick to the final transparency. They made white fluffy towels look positively brilliant, yet at the same time held highlight and shadow detail wonderfully.

Doing stuff like that was only possible using transparency film and viewing the film on colour corrected light boxes with shrouds that eliminated room lighting.

For fashion photography, although we didn't do that much, we had had one very large studio running fashion stuff. For those we used the brilliant Rolleiflex 6000 series with motordrives and almost every conceivable aid a fashion photographer could wish for. The Rollei lenses were stunning and seemed to be a combination of Hasselblad flatness and Mamiya's contrast rolled into one beautiful range of lenses. Rollei transparencys when on the light boxes had their particular look, we often drooled over them.

One important aspect of transparency film usage, was with colour correction (CC) filters. You were able to use a certain CC filter and see the difference on the lightbox. However if you used a CC on a colour negative film, the CC filter effect would invariably be negated in the printing process.

Transparency film was king for almost all types of professional photography because the advertising directors, or whomever, would okay lightbox seen frames for reproduction immediately.

We used colour negative film for anything where the colour balance couldn't be controlled, or if a mural sized print was required. We made mural prints 1.8m high by 6m wide and often spliced these prints to mage billboard sized mural prints. Literally sewing them together using sailboat sail making techniques and machinery.

If you consider something like the Sears catalogue, all colour images were shot on large format to the exact size they would be in the final reproduction. A page was made up, to size, of all images needed for that page. The emulsion was "stripped" off the backing and repositioned with the rest of the images on a mock-up page. This new page was used to create the four, or sometimes three, separation pages used on the printing presses. These studios employed high numbers of photographers and assistants, as well as lab experts and those doing the 'stripping' which was a very high paid, and usually union job.
Fashion without models, was also done this way.
Fashion with models was usually shot on 120 and they made the separation from that with a different process.
It was really the printing process that dictated how the photography was shot.

In 1984 I worked at a large newspaper. We shot mostly black and white but the section fronts were all colour. We shot all section fronts on 120 film, including sports with a hasselblad. It was tough to do, and we didn't shoot much sports in colour. We would sometimes shoot spot news like a house fire on 35mm slide film but they pressman hated using the tiny film and would always complain. For the most part colour was 120 only.

You would need at least two cameras to work at the papers, one loaded with black and white and the other with colour. Most photographers I knew used a chrome body camera for the slide film or 'chromes" like Ektachrome, and a black camera for the b&w work. That way you could tell at a glance which camera had which film in it, since we usually had multiple copies of the same camera model.

I worked at that paper for five years and then moved onto another bigger daily paper. This paper had 11 photographers on staff. They shot colour negative and the photographers would make b&w prints for the editors to chose from. Once the selections were made, colour prints were ordered from the darkroom, to the exact size they would run in the paper. Everything in colour was printed to the exact size and the separations would be ganged together and made at once.

Again it was dictated by the printing press process with little flexibility.

After I left the newspapers and went to Major League Baseball and then the NFL. Everything was shot on slide film. We bought cases of Fuji100 and would push it one stop as standard. When Kodak came out with Kodachrome200 I switched to that and it became my favourite film. It took about a week to come back from the lab but you could also push it to ISO500 (ASA back then), but that had to go to Texas from processing and would take about two weeks.

I became very accurate with exposure since there was no bracketing with sports.

Fun times.

This shot from the NBA was done through the backboard with a remote Hasselblad with a 40mm lens, using strobes to light the entire court. It was shot on Ektachrome 100.

koraks said:

I don't think I ever attempted to track down the datasheets of the films that form the basis of the memories/experiences above in an attempt to compare RMS granularity specs. But the pattern for me was quite clear. Was/am I wrong? Maybe...?

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You're not wrong. Kodacolor 100 in the 80's was much grainer than either Ektachrome 100 or Kodachrome 64. All the C41 films in that time had much more pronounced grain and less saturated colour than comparable slide films.

Ever seen prints from Kodacolor 1000 from the mid 80's when it was the fastest colour film you could buy? Bowling ball sized grain.

Rob Skeoch said:

This shot from the NBA

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It's magnificent!
And so is the experience you shared with us, as well as the contributions of @Mr Bill, @Mick Fagan and @cmacd123 who share their practical, hands-on insights how things worked on the shop floor back then. Thanks so much! (And sorry if I left anyone out!)

reddesert said:

So if we compare say 100-speed slide and negative film of the 90s-2000s, we may see much less of a difference.

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I wondered about this, but the comparison I showed was all film from the early 2000s with a single exception (late 1990s), and the difference appeared to still be there at that point.
In fact, I shot very little color print film in those years right up to the point where digital came along, because every attempt to 'live with' color negative got be bogged down into what I then considered a grainy mess that was impossible to color balance. I'm better at the latter now (and optical printing interestingly made things so much easier for me), and I've learned with the grain and just shoot 120 or sheet film if it bothers me...but when I was going through those scanned slides yesterday, it's easy for me to recall why I was so loyal to slide film back then. It really had the cleanliness of digital, in a way.

For amusement purposes, here's one of the images from a series I took one of the examples from:

35mm Velvia 100F. I can project this big, or zoom into the scan right up to pixel-peeping levels, and it'll remain as clean as a whistle. I've shot quite a bit of Ektar (which wasn't around back then) and this is one of the things it really cannot do.

koraks said:

That was a large part of it, yes. It did away with the inherent trouble of color balancing the results from color negative film. The image on the slide was precisely how the photographer intended it to be; no second guessing about filtration settings etc. necessary. Another part was that slide film had superior characteristics in terms of fineness of grain for instance, so it was technically very well suited to form a strong link in the imaging chain.

The problem of dynamic range was mostly worked around because a lot of the work was done in a studio environment will full control over lighting conditions.

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Slides are also much easier to show a photo editor of a magazine, corporate PR guy or gal and were easily developed by a Pro lab and back to the studio light table in an hour or two, when such labs supported a thriving analog community shooting films.

A 6 x 6 cm slide or 4" x 5" positive, even 135 slides could be quickly sorted into smaller and smaller groups as the photographer and editor decided what they liked best or decided to keep props and models on hand in case of needed 'tweaking' the shot to better get whatever it is the editor wants or something the photographer thinks rates a reshoot, again, while the set is still in place, the Models fed and the props polished or dulled down to the correct photo attitude.

If the models scoot before the last approval is given, there's every chance you might not get them back when you need them, for whatever reason and prototype machines that photos were need for, could often be disappeared back in the companies engineering department, all together and never be seen again in that configuration.

Plus rebooking the stylist you depend on, cloths, hair, makeup, food, etc, plus other talent, plus jobs that'll need puting off or are lost altogether because you're paying the price for early dismissal, are VERY expensive, especially if you've got to do them on the editor's or PR guy's inevitably inflexible calendar!


Since I mostly shot slides over the years, from the mid 1970's the narrow margins of exposure, filtration and lighting was never an issue for me, but slides or positives do need acquired or intuitive handling, where as negative's can have a lot of cures applied in the printers enlargers and chemistry, that a tightly executed positive depending on the shooters abilities can not tolerated.

IMO