Colour film development/Film Scanners

[kamboura]

Hi all,
I have a couple question for those people still using film. Do any of you do colour development at home? if so, can I get some rough details on that... costs/difficulty etc...
My second question is on film scanners, how good are they really at converting the picture to digital. Is it like taking a digital shot? or they is always more noice.

Thanks.

[Michael Fanelli]

Hi all,
I have a couple question for those people still using film. Do any of you do colour development at home? if so, can I get some rough details on that... costs/difficulty etc...
My second question is on film scanners, how good are they really at converting the picture to digital. Is it like taking a digital shot? or they is always more noice.

Color development at home is possible but it's expensive and tricky. In general, you will get better results much cheaper by letting the machine do it.

Scanners do a good job if you are willing to do the post processing (all digital really needs post processing). It won't be the same as that from a digital camera because of the grain.

[gahspidy]

I use film and have only the negatives developed , no prints. Costs me 3.00 for a 36 exp. roll. I scan my negs on the minolta dual scan lll and get equivelent resolution to that of an 11 mp camera. Only post work is cleaning it up a bit after the scan. I usually blow the image up on the screen and then clone out all the bits of dust and whatever else may have been on the neg. Make sure to dust off the negatives with a dust off type device to make your post work as minimal as possible.

[JimP]

I am using a Nikon IV-ED scanner and get the equivalent of a 10-12 megapixel image. I can usually enlarge the image and print on 13x19 paper on an Epson 1280 printer.

Jim

[another view]

Never tried color negs, but I understand that temperature control is very critical. Might not be worth the trouble. I know with B&W, photographers spend their lives finding just the right film, EV, developer, developing technique, etc to give them the negatives they're after. I don't know that color is necessarily the same - it's right or it's wrong, basically.

As far as scanning goes, it will take some time and experience to get great results, but if you make the investment you will be happy with the prints. I do recommend getting a film scanner with digital ICE although it doesn't work on B&W.

I'm not a scanning expert but have done it enough to see my results improve. To give you an idea in an extreme case, here's a scan of Portra 800. Photoshop was applied to fix a couple scratches in the negative, and a light Gaussian blur was added to the whole image to soften the grain a little. No sharpening (doesn't work with this image).

One lab I used to use recently switched to a digital minilab - they scan the negative and probably do some basic adjustments automatically, then print. I *used* to use them because my scanned file after working with it in Photoshop looks much better than theirs. I had hoped to compare it to a wet-process print but that didn't happen.

[Jeff82]

I've done B&W developing, but not color. So, I can't answer your first question.

A good film scanner with ICE can produce excellent digital images with minimal hassle. I find that a fair amount of color balancing and sharpening is needed after scanning, but this can be done fairly quickly in Photoshop. One advantage of a film scanner is that it allows one to shoot slides and still get a very acceptable print cheaply. For me it's the only way to go.

--Jeff

[Franglais]

Hi all,
I have a couple question for those people still using film. Do any of you do colour development at home? if so, can I get some rough details on that... costs/difficulty etc...
My second question is on film scanners, how good are they really at converting the picture to digital. Is it like taking a digital shot? or they is always more noice.

Thanks.

I've done all sorts of colour development at home - negative film, slides, prints from negatives, prints from slides. I don't do it any more. It's MUCH TOO DIFFICULT to get the temperature right and keep the products pure. Colour film development (without printing) is relatively cheap at the lab then I scan the results.

I can't really compare with digital because I don't have a digital camera. My impressions:

1. Colour negative film will cope better with contrasty light than digital or slide film because the information in the highlights is recorded in the densest parts of the negative and often you can get it back in the scan
2. A digital camera may do better than film when the light balance is really bad because you can set the camera up on the spot to deal with it rather than trying to sort it out in the scan
3. Film scans have grain not noise, but I always set my Nikon Coolscan IV to remove the grain and sharpen the image.
4. Looking at test shots downloaded from Canon's web site my results from film+scanner look better than a Canon 10D/300D (6Mpix) but not as good as a 1DS (10Mpix)

Hope that helps.

Charles