I heard some stuff about Slide film...

[niteschaos]

Like what you get after developement is it. That unlike print film, during printing you can't change the blue or red content of the print. Is this true? Is this why so many people in publishing use slide film? So that when a good exposure is made there is nothing else the photographer has to worry about?

[straightarm]

On a traditional enlarger you can adjust the colour balance for both negatives and slides.

Most labs now use a digital printing process so again they can adjust the clour balance for both negatives and slides.

What you can't do is adjust the colour balance of the slide itself, so if you shot indoors with tungsten light on daylight film, and then projected the image onto a screen, you would get an orange colour cast.

Simon

[another view]

Couple things to add - traditional ways to enlarge a slide would be an interneg print or Cibachrome (Ilfochrome). With an interneg, the lab would photograph the slide with special negative film and print that like any other negative. In practice, some colors work better than others and there can be a contrast problem, especially in the highlights. A Ciba is a very high quality print that looks very similar to the original if done correctly. This is almost a lost art, and if you can find anyone who does it they will charge a lot.

Digital scanning and printing has dominated slide printing for a few (several?) years. It's possible to adjust color balance and anything else in Photoshop and the results are excellent. The equipment to do it can be very inexpensive, and even high end digital printing isn't too bad compared to the price of a Ciba (or digital itself a few years ago).

Typically, the slide itself is the finished product. With negative film it's the print that's the final product so darkroom adjustments can happen during printing. What you choose to use can depend on a lot of things - mainly what your client wants if it's professional work. Slides will give you great color and sharpness but don't have the latitude that print film has.

[niteschaos]

If negatives are so much easier to print, why do some people still ask for or shot slides? Are slides that much easier to store than prints?

[another view]

Slides are easier to scan and store than negatives - IMO. With slides, you can throw out the ones you don't want to keep, with negs you probably wouldn't cut out only frames 4, 18, 23 and 31 from a roll (for example). They're also less expensive for high quality processing.

The finished product I talked about above has something to do with it too - take a well-exposed negative to ten different really good labs and you'll get ten prints that all look different. With a slide, it's all up to you at time of capture!

[niteschaos]

That's what I was talking about at the beginning of the post. I want to be able to have consistent results from the lab. Dealing with negatives, you can go and get enlargements with different color and contrast than the original print they made themselves a week ago. So you are saying that for some, the narrow exposure latitude and grain at higher ISO speeds is worth having the creative the process end with the photographer?

[tijean]

Add this one to the "I think I read this one somewhere" file (an information pool much poluted since the advent of the internet), but I always thought that magazines use to only accept slides because they were easier to preview and store, in addition to having more color saturation than print films of the day. A printer (even pre-digital) could change coloration if they wanted but results tend to be more consistant because, unlike with a negative, they have a referance to work from. Slide films have a whole different set of characteristics than your standard print films. Maybe I should go back and reread the photo.net article on this one:

http://www.photo.net/equipment/film#Slide

[another view]

So you are saying that for some, the narrow exposure latitude and grain at higher ISO speeds is worth having the creative the process end with the photographer?

Well, sometimes... Depends on what I'm shooting. For example, I'd never dream of shooting slides at a wedding! Most of what I was doing on slides I'm doing on digital these days, but I still shoot slides in some cases. Generally when I'm doing personal work and I don't have to worry about correcting color balance (like inside a building with fluorescent lighting) then I prefer slides when shooting color film. They look different - hard to describe. Part of that is the color saturation, although Kodak 400VC neg film might challenge that, but then the narrow exposure latitude gives it a different look too. The inconsistencies from print to print drove me nuts. If I scan a slide and print it at 10 different places it should (theoretically) look the same. In reality there are minor differences but they're much closer than neg film would be.

BTW, if you need a high speed slide film I'd go with Fuji Provia 400F. At it's rated speed I can't tell the difference between it and Provia 100F. It also pushes one stop very well (that's 800 speed) and seen others push it two stops (1600!). It's an expensive film though.