[filmscanners] Re: Scanning negs vs. slides

["Julian Robinson" <jrobinso@pcug.org.au>]

At 12:47 16/04/02, you wrote:
>On Mon, 15 Apr 2002 21:17:10 -0400  Petru Lauric (petru.lauric@rcn.com)
>wrote:
> > That's why usually a well exposed slide looks very rich,
> > very dense.
>...
>and Tony wrote:
>...but you *can* produce scans from negs which look as saturated and punchy
>as scans from slides. Either way is just R, G & B 0-255. With slide you
>discard a lot of image information at the shooting stage, with colour neg
>you defer those decisions until working on the scan and have a whole new
>degree of freedom not to mention endless second chances when you decide you
>got it wrong.
>
>Slide often forces you to sacrifice either shadow and/or highlight detail.
>With neg, you can if you wish retain both, by combining (say) an image
>which has good shadows and midtone separation but blown highlights, with
>one where you mask off the image apart from the highlights then adjust for
>those. This works absurdly well, is not difficult, and enables informal
>photography of subjects which would be impossible on tranny without an
>array of studio flash fill-in.

Absolutely! to this.  But I agree too with what Petru says, in my
experience if you find a subject which is low contrast (studio lighting or
landscapes at the right time of day are my examples) there is something
about a slide that is particularly enticing - it is not only the lack of
grain (compared with expanded neg grain) but also a tonal continuity or
"velvetiness"  or it might be a richness that I have never got from a neg
(35mm).  I can get my negs to be punchy and saturated and spectacular, but
never that smoothness velvetiness or richness that a well exposed slide brings.

But that said I use negs almost always, for the reasons Tony said here.

Julian

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