Slides vs. negatives

[stric]

Hi,

I'm a newbie when it comes to film choices but I occasionally read about slide

film and I am intrigued by it. I've never used one but a few friends who are

good with film told me that slide film is pretty much the best thing imaginable

when it comes to color film. Now, how much better is slide film when compared to

standard negative film. What are some real pros and cons of slide film? Is there

a good overview of slide film on this forum?

[mtk]

Hi Emir...Good questions, but....First off I wouldn't be using the word "better"..Remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder! Slide film (I am partial to Velvia) has much less exposure error tolerance than film. Make sure you know your camera/metering. Velvia specifically makes awsome colors for outdoor/landscape photography, but in my opinion is awful for portrait (skin tones). If you take slide pic's how are you going to use them? Slide projector? Scan to disk/print/pc/?

I shoot med format film (RB67 with Velvia).AND Nikon D70s digital.

I think the end result on how you are going to use your pic's is really what you need to consider!

Have Fun! Mark

[charles_stobbs3]

IMHO slides in a hand held viewer with natural light is the absolute best way to look at pictures.

[mendel_leisk]

Slides have a lot less exposure latitude than negative film. Things like splashes of sunlight are prone to come out nasty bleached clear. On the other hand, they give a more contrasty, punchier rendition of a scene.

 

I've found slides a lot easier to scan, especially with the slide itself available to check your color balance. Scans of slides are also a lot less grainy in my experience. I think part of that is due to the inversion of color negative scans.

 

I haven't use either in a few years. While I still have a film camera, I haven't touched it since getting into digital single lens reflex photography.

[edgar_njari]

Slide film, in general tends to exaggerate contrast compared to a more natural contrast of negative film.

Also, a lot of slide films have also exaggerated saturation, sometimes to the extreme.

 

I'd say slide is good for following things: projection (obviously), stylish images with high saturation and contrast, nature scenes where you want lots of saturation

20 years ago, you could consider, you could say slide was just another type of film, and not a film with a special "look", but today when you have digital photography and high-latitude negatives, slide films stands out as a film with a special look as is no longer just a general photographic material.

 

Negative is better for: general stuff where you simply want things to show "normal" in the print, portraits, nature where you want to capture a softer atmosphere (like magic hour), sunlight, well anything where you don't need a special slide film look.

 

But remember, you can always make negative look like slide in digital, but you can't make slide look like neg, because you can't have information that isn't there on film in the first place (like they do in movies)

The price for that is grain, because when you "push" the negatives contrast to look like slide, you are also pushing the contrast of grain making it more visible.

That's why if you want the end product to be a high contrast and saturation image, its best to use slide film because in that domain it will give you most quality.

As long as you keep negative in its own domain, it will perform at high quality, unless you DO want grain.

 

In short, slide give high precision and quality contrasty and saturated images.

While negative gives performs best when printed in a more natural contrast and color.

Both reign in their own domains.

[raymond___k_osmotherly]

Another aspect is that slides can be stored in clear pages in a folder and easily seen and retrieved for viewing or printing (or even for just browsing) whereas the subject matter in negatives is not so easily recognisable. I have medium format slides going back as far as the 1960s and keep them in clear sheets and quite enjoy just flipping through them from time to time.

 

Ray

[randall_pukalo]

Emir,

You are new to film I see. Your friends are correct - slides will blow your mind. You must try at least 1 roll. For outdoors shots, try some Fuji Velvia 50, Fuji Velvia 100, or Kodak E100VS. For people shots, try some Kodak Elitec Chrome 100, or Fuji Sensia 400.

To see what Velvia 50 looks like, go to any book store, and look at the travel/landcsape photography books. Velvia pretty much dominates landscape photography. And slide film is all that landscape photographers use, due to its high resolution, color saturation, and fine grain.

[keith_lubow]

I think that there are a few main reasons that slide film is loved so much.

 

1. Slides are usually (or at least "often") viewed directly without any enlargement, so they appear extremely sharp, and have tons of detail that you can't see in a print, from a neg. or positive. This makes them seem extremely rich, detailed, and sharp. Besides, this, there is no orange mask or other notable base density to contend with, and no looking at the film imagining what the positive will look like in the end...sort of the old fashioned version of "instant" gratification that digital is today.

 

2. They were the industry standard for commercial photographers until digital came along. They were what magazines, newspapers, ad companies, etc. wanted for reproducion to be printed on presses (as opposed to on enlarging paper). Thus they have a "pro" label and mystique attached to them for all eternity.

 

Personally, while I love the beauty of a glorious slide on a lightbox, or a wonderful Ilfochrome print in a gallery, I think that color neg. film is a far more useful medium...for me, at any rate. Printing is easier and MUCH less expensive, grain is notably finer, you have a lot more control over your negative with exposure, it handles high contrast situations MUCH better, I think skin tones look a lot better...etc.

 

Don't get me wrong...I love to shoot slides, and nothing looks like them, but you are limited nowadays as to what you can acutally do with them. I shoot them to either: 1. project (35mm) or 2. display backlit (medium and large formats) or just hold up to the light and enjoy at actual size. It's hard to do a lot else with a slide these days, although there may still be some publications out there that want them, and plenty of photographers still using them...especially 8X10 or 4X5.

 

So...try it out. It will be great fun. But just know what you want your final result to be. Printing from slides is expensive (unless you do it digitally, but then what's the point?)

 

Keith

[drjedsmith]

When scanned with a high-end film scanner, modern slide film can be made into very large enlargments, because the grain is so fine. I have recently had a pro lab make me a pair of 20x30 enlargements from two 35mm slides, and they are matted and framed in my office. Many compliments from them - and the grain is certainly under control, even at that size. I have never had that good of results when printing from negative film.<BR>

So, at the moment, I shoot slides with the end purpose of viewing them, but also to scan. There is more detail in a sharp scan of Velvia or Astia than in many images captured by digital cameras. Is it worth it? Maybe. Is it more of a challenge? Definately. :-)<BR>

Jed

[edgar_njari]

Isn't not that the grain is fine, it's that it has smaller "amplitude" (contrast) so its a lot less visible.

Negative film (once printed) has its grain much more visible because the whole image is increased in contrast a lot in printing (including grain)

 

But it's not so an issue with MF and LF.

 

Though I still don't understand why people who complain about grain use 35mm in the first place? It's a format perfect when you DO want to see grain.

[hclim]

Edgar,

 

Are you able to elaborate on the use of noise reduction software on grain reduction? For me sometimes it works for the whole image, sometimes it doesn't completely remove grain in the shadow areas.

[david_henderson]

Well, you can

 

1.Either have a series of very small slides which will look nothing unless you project them or at least look at them through a loupe on a decent lightbox, or you can have 36 6x4 or 7x5 proof prints of decent quality in your hand by using neg film.

 

2. Either you can keep your slides as slides- or if you want prints from them you can take them to your local minilab where they'll scan them and make prints for you. You will of course have already paid for the film and E6 (slide) processing so your prints will have ended up costing you a bit more, and your prints may not be as good as if you'd started off from neg. film because most of the Frontier etc machines you come across at minilabs are set up primarily to deal with negs and the staff capability to draw the best from slides is far from ubiquitous.

 

You do of course get to choose which slides you get printed and you may save a few pennies by eliminating some, but its still likely that your prints will have cost you a little more than if you started out with neg film.

 

3. If you want to share your photographs with others, then prints and computer screens are easier and better than slides (hell, a cellphone's easier to share photgraphs with then slides), unless you're all real enthusiasts who can sit in the dark for an hour without nodding off. Prints are the easiest way for most people I'd guess though you can get both negs and slides scanned in a package from your lab at extra cost. The scans from negs are more often going to be better though.

 

4. You can use neg films which have a pretty wide exposure latitude and with a half decent camera with a sophisticated series of auto exposure settings you can be getting pretty good pictures soon. Or you can use slide film which is much more exposure critical and still be wondering in a few moths what you have to do to get slide exposures right pretty much all the time.

 

5. If though, you want to pick just a very few of your best images and get these scanned and custom printed beautifully ( and probably expensively) then you may well be better off with slide film and you may well make better judgments about which images you should get printed. And there's no doubt- a well composed and exposed slide, correctly viewed, is more of a thing of beauty than a 6x4 print. They are by comparison more luminous more saturated and more involving than a minilab print.

 

I use slide film for all my colour work. I do it because in reality only 5. above matters much to me, and I have the facility to expose and view my slides well. I project my medium format slides infrequently to interested audiences and I don't really photograph to share with friends and family much.

 

"Better" is a complicated concept.

[ilkka_nissila]

Edgar, no scanner can render the size of the grain correctly; using a microscope and a digital camera you might see actual grain. The scanner optics low-pass filters (blurs) the grain to appear pixel size. Large grains appear as high contrast pixel variation, small grains appear as low contrast pixel variation.

 

So my question is this: what basis do you have to support that the grain in slow slide film is not finer than that of comparable negative film? The lower contrast of the grain in film scans would suggest finer grain in the film itself.

[edward_karaa1]

In addition to all the good points mentioned above, there is also the resolution factor. Slide film has usually higher resolution than an equivalent negative film.

[RaymondC]

I think I am still a newbie.

I prefer a slide, first time I did a roll of Velvia of not pple but just travel photo's and stuff, beautiful. I use a pro lab and I did my other film there, they were all photo film, professional grade a selection of kodak and fuji stuff. IMO, photo film is not up to it, I used a pro lab which does advertising and stuff a prints bigger than a car. They just look ordinary, they are nice photo's, IMO if I were to use photo film then I get my own photo film scanner and photo shop it but these days I prob just use a digital SLR.

 

Slide film does need white balance correction with filters or scan yourself and photoshop. I like slide b/c it is the real thing, right off the film its color on the negative (or a slide is called a positive), no one has a say in the color, not you, not the lab, only the manufacturer has the say in the color recipe. But if you are shooting in night or say outdoors or indoors without lights turned on you don't need filters and don't shoot in shade.

 

IMO even with a prob lab photo film, if you want good prints, you really need to get a print done and go back and ask for corrections to your own preference unless they really know you. Which I say with photo film its best just to process film only and scan and adjust and print yourself or print digitally at the lab.

[edgar_njari]

Ilkka.

 

I'm not really talking about scanners.

 

When you look at a negative and a slide under a loupe, the grain is about the same in comparable emulsions.

But the difference is that, that same image you are seeing on the negative needs to be amplified in order to be printable (contrast needs to be increased), the increase in contrast increases grain amplitude.

 

Both films pretty much use the same generation of technology are are made in a similar way too.

 

Remember that grain RMS is not actually a number describing grain size, but grain variations. in other words amplitude of random density changes (amplitude of the grain "noise")

[edgar_njari]

And you are right that no scanner can actually show grain particles

 

But a grain particle is not the same thing as visible grain.

The grain we see in prints and slides are big clusters of grain particles. Density variations of grain particles. Where we see a grain "lump" its actually an area where grain particles are denser and reach their peak, and where we thing we see "area between grain", that's actually an area of lower particle density.

Grain particles can only be seen under a microscope, what we see is simple density noise, random variations of density.

While you can't see actual grain particles with a scanner, a 8000dpi scanner can be fairly accurate in rendering these variations in density, which we call grain.

But still, that grain is fractal, so you can only render it right one one level

 

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/support/h1/exposureP.shtml#structure

[j.a.]

See the links

 

 

http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0106/dw0106-1.html

 

http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0306/rb0306-1.html

 

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1306/is_n8_v60/ai_15774214

 

 

Landscape, nature, fashion & publicity photographers are still using plenty of slides (when they are not shooting digital) because they are interested in superb saturated colours (no Adobe Photoshop CS working...), pure contrasts and deep perspective. Slide is namely intended for projection, less for printing or scanning.

 

 

 

Best

 

J.A.