why are my slides so much better than printed negatives?

[starvy]

my film gear is simple and i now stick to only a few lenses. this would include an olympus om4 setup with zuiko f2.8

100m and a f1.4 50mm. on the bessa r rangefinder, increasingly, i am only shooting with the f2.5 color skopar

35mm. even when using pro negative films within the useby date, i get moderate results from a commercial photolab

(jessops). lately, i have used a development only service from peak-imaging.co.uk and the negatives are not bad,

however, my home scanning with an epson 4490 scanner does not seem to get pictures as good as i see here from

other users. on colour slides, i literally get brilliant results from the same setup. the sharpness, resolution and

definition is astounding at times. sometimes, i simply can't believe that i had taken these pictures. there are very few

bad exposures, perhaps four to five at max in a 36 roll and some of the better composed pictures really make me

want to go out and shoot more. the problem is that, what do i do with the slides. the scanning setup is not brilliant. i

could not afford to buy a decent scanner. so the only option would be to single out the frames i really like and get

them professionally printed. if this is the case, should i get my slides developed without the mounting from now?

 

why are negatives so poor compared to my slides? jessops is a high street photographic specialist. it is not a

supermarket minilab. certainly, the branch i go to seem to have the right machinery. so why do my negatives come

out blurred and sometimes with exposure problems when the slides are fantastic? am i doing something wrong at my

end? i use the camera's inbuilt metre for both setup.

 

could i perhaps specify something when i get negatives processed so that the lab could fix problems? of course, i

am assuming that the problems are at my end!

[mike_earussi1]

Slides, and prints from them (using now obsolete R3 paper), have always looked better than color negative films, as they have much greated color saturation and contrast than neg film due to the red mask required by neg film which tends to "muddy" colors up a bit.

[erik_hattrem]

http://www.tmax100.com/photo/

look at det Fuji dataguide. You will see why slide is better:)

[eric friedemann]

If prints from your color negatives don't look better than prints from your slides, you have one of two problems:

 

 

1. You don't know how to expose color negative film.

 

 

2. You're having your color negative film processed by incompetents.

 

 

Historically, Type R prints from slides sucked. You'd take a transparency- a high-contrast medium designed for projection, not printing- then you'd print it onto Type R paper- basically high-contrast transparency film with an opaque backing. Maintaining decent highlight- and shadow-detail were difficult at best. (Though, many people don't know a properly-exposed negative or properly-made print if it bit them, and would like the blown-out look of a Type R print.)

 

 

With the current drop of digital machines, slides and negatives are both scanned into the same machines and and are typically printed onto C Paper- standard color negative printing paper. Digital machines generally turn out better prints from color slides than Type R prints because you aren't printing an overly-contrasty slide onto overly-contrasty Type R paper.

 

 

Digital machines may take so-so quality negatives and produce a better print than an optical machine by digitally enhancing the scan. However, I liked the results I got from well-exposed color negatives printed optically better than the results I'm getting from digital printing machines.

[erik_hattrem]

Try Ilfochrome with your slides, i just love my ilfochrome prints!

[jim_gardner4]

Try taking your neg film somewhere else to be processed/printed. I almost never use colour neg film now but when I

did some of the very well known "labs" produced really bad results, so bad that I could sometimes print a colour neg

my self using black and white chemicals onto black and white paper and get sharper results! I have an Epson 4990

scanner and find it is capable of better results than some of the pro labs can (or at least do) print from slides or

negs. IMO there are so many people taking photos now, many of whom want to record birthdays, weddings etc, that

the high street shops dont put anywhere near enough effort in to producing top quality results. For a few pounds you

could take a couple of negs to various labs, tell them about your problem and ask them to print them. I once went

into Snappy Snaps with some negs that a lab had printed and told Snappy Snaps I was very unhappy with the prints

the other lab had done and could SS do better? The results were bang on perfect for a fraction of the previous price.

In other words it may not be a fault of yours or your equipment or the labs equipment, but the person operating the

machinery. If this sounds like I am having a go at some lab operators, I am. One persons money is just as good as

the next persons and the negs may mean just as much to both customers regardless of content and as such should

be given the same respect and care.

[User_502260]

There is no reason you can't get good results from print film. Send it to A&I in Los Angeles and you will get beautiful results. I don't agree that Type R prints from slides were bad. With the right slide they were excellent. It's true that even contrast masks did not control contrast as well as digital scanning/printing does but you can no longer see the grain pattern of the film. If you have a very contrasty scene them print film will give you a better chance of controlling things. If your negatives are blurred and improperly exposed it isn't the processor's fault.

[charles_stobbs3]

Blurring doesn't sound like a film problem. Blurring sounds like camera movement or out of focus. Try some simple shots at a measured distance and at least 1/250 shutter.

[randrew1]

The beauty of type "R" prints is in the eye of the beholder. They do tend to be high in contrast. This

yields high saturation until you reach the limits of the print latitude. Type "R" prints are good for highly

colorful shots, but too garish to display subtle tonality. Weddings were almost never shot on slides.

 

There is no good reason why slide film would be sharp and color negs (not the prints) would be blurred.

Under exposure of color negs leads to low contrast and smoky shadows that might be described as

blurry.

 

The orange makes in color negatives does NOT muddy the colors. It produces brighter and more

accurate colors. You should see some of the prints from Kodacolor film from the early 1940's. This was

before colored couplers (the masks) were invented. The images were in color, but it was so bad that

portrait photographers shot B&W and then colored the prints with acrylic paint.

[ronald_moravec1]

A well exposed color neg printed at a pro lab is far superior to anything you can get from a tranny.

 

Thats why portrait studios use color neg.

 

The drug store won`t get you want.

[benny_spinoza]

I scan my negative print film on a Nikon scanner with SilverFast, and have the images printed on Kodak photo paper, such as their Lustre paper. I am impressed with the color saturation and brilliance of the prints. Far better than prints I have from my slide film. As others have said, you are seeing the results of poor scanning/printing from your negative print film. One must either find a good pro lab, or DIY.

[randall_pukalo]

Get a used slide projector from E bay or a garage sale. You should be able to pick one up for next to nothing. My wife got me a free one through Freecycle recently in fact.

 

If you think your slides look good now, wait till you see them projected! It will blow you away. Projected slides are one of the great experiences in photography, so good that you will see the merit in shooting slides simply for projection. Of course, you can easily get them printed too now.

 

Seriously, the firts time you see your slides projected up on the wide screen (or a white wall), shining in all their brilliance, wonderful colors, and amazing resolution, it will be one of the salient moments in your life that you will always remember.

[Vlad Soare]

A negative has more accurate colors than a slide. They may not be so punchy, but they are more accurate. It's a common misconception that slides have better colors. They are not "better", they're just more saturated. All things being equal, a negative will render more natural and accurate colors than a slide. <br>

That being said, I agree that nothing compares to a perfectly exposed and projected slide.

[starvy]

i have now picked up a slide viewer which magnifies the slides to three times. i spend a while last night going through about sixty or so slides. 30 of these were simply 'outstanding' so to speak! i really could not believe what i was seeing. never thought i could get images this good using my cameras out of the rest 20 were perfectly acceptable and better than my usual negatives. five had exposure problems - obviously i have metered the lighter part of the composition, two had double images and three were just too dark.

 

i think it looks like i need to visit the local specialist photostore which has a studio in the attic. i think having a studio probably means that it is run by a photographer. see what he can come up with with regards to prints.

[scott_turner]

"A well exposed color neg printed at a pro lab is far superior to anything you can get from a tranny."

 

"Thats [sic]why portrait studios use color neg."

 

If we take this statement to its logical conclusion, then we'd know that the best prints now come from digital, as that's what most portrait studios use today. :-)

 

Portrait studios traditionally used color negative film for a variety of reasons including convenience and cost, accurate skin tone rendition and gentler contrast curves. None of this has much to do with what can or can't be done with a color transparency in terms of printing.

 

The days when color transparency prints were a poor second to those from negatives left us when the Cibachrome process came into being and have thankfully never returned. The finest prints (in terms of technical print quality) that I've ever personally seen have all come from large format (mostly 8x10) color transparency film, drum scanned and Lightjet or Chromira printed.

 

The bottom line: you can, with the right knowledge and equipment (or the right lab), get exceptional print results from either medium.

 

Scott

[robert_jaques]

Hi Starvy

 

Like you I have never been overly impressed with the printed results I have had from negative film. That is why I have shot slide film almost exclusively for the past 20 years. Are you comparing slides viewed with a loupe on a light box to your prints from negative? If you are I think this is an unfair comparsion, slides will always look better in a comparsion like this. I think the higher contrast, higher color saturation and outstanding sharpness and detail of slide films such as velvia simply give prints made from slide film much more impact. I cannot comment on the latest negative films, they may have improved and be on par with modern slide films by now. Most prints I have seen made done with colour negative film may have better shadow detail, but overall they look flater and lack the sharpness, colour saturation and contrast that is apparent in a well made print from a slide (Cibachrome or printed digitally on real photo paper) IMHO. Of course some subjects may suit negative film better ie portaits and people shots.

My advice would be to keep shooting slides and have the slides sleeved. Have only the images you wish to print, scanned at a pro lab. Buy a box of slide mounts and mount only the keepers. This is what I do. You will save a lot of money this way. When funds permit buy yourself a decent dedicated film scanner. You can then do all the adjustments you need to do to the image yourself ( Only you know how you wish to have the image printed). That way (if you know what you are doing) you will often get better prints than if you left it all to the lab to do the work. I own a Epson 4870 flatbed scanner (Which I use for my large formal 4x5 scans) and a Canon FS4000 dedicated film scanner for 35mm. For 35mm, scans from the epson look like soft mush in comparison to the Canon. I do not use the Epson for scanning 35mm at all. I believe these scanners are only really suitable for scanning 35mm film for Web use and maybe making 6x4 prints.

 

Best of luck

[eric friedemann]

I think the problem here is that most people don't really know what a great print from a color negative looks like. Start going to museums; search out older prints by the likes of Richard Misrach and Joel Meyerowitz, who've shot color negative film in 8x10 view cameras and whose work has been meticulously printed on C paper.

 

 

With images that exhibit short tonal ranges, Glossy Cibachrome/Ilfochrome prints can be made that are certainly seductive- I have several hanging in my home. However, even newer digitally-produced Ilfochrome prints can't overcome the high contrast of the print medium for images with long tonal scales.

 

 

At this point, though, this argument is becoming futile- the great printers are inexorably switching to scanning negatives and transparencies and printing on newer inkjet mediums to get more subtle results than they could ever have acheived on C, R or Ciba/Ilfo:

 

 

http://www.popphoto.com/howto/2201/inkjet-printing-lessons-from-joel-meyerowitz.html?print_page=y

[john_castronovo]

There's no reason why either slides or negs shouldn't produce excellent prints except for the expertise of the person doing the work. Color accuracy on transparencies should be much better on the whole with an advantage going to negatives for more easily pleasing flesh tones and a wider dynamic range to work from. That makes exposure more lax for the photographer using negs, but it doesn't mean much on the resulting print.

[Vlad Soare]

<i>"Color accuracy on transparencies should be much better on the whole"</i>

<br><br>

Why should it? The orange mask in a color negative plays an important role in color accuracy. Reversal films must

do without that mask, which leads to some compromises. Of course, if you make prints you may be able to use

filters to emulate the orange mask to an extent, but a mask embedded in the film at exactly the right place will

always be more efficient than an overall filter.<br>

The colors of a slide can be more saturated, more "punchy", more beautiful if you want, but accuracy isn't their

strongest point.

[john_castronovo]

I spent the last thirty years as a specialist in color reproduction, and I can tell you that there has never been

a serious consideration in the industry for the use of negative film for accurate color from anyone. That

includes commercial (not portrait) photographers, labs and manufacturers of film itself. First of all, negative

films aren't made for color accuracy in the first place. They're made to favor pleasing flesh tones. Even

internegative film which was made for reproduction was far less than perfect as a copy film under ideal

conditions and very difficult to use by anyone who wasn't schooled in the use of densitometry and plotting curves.

 

Plus, negatives are only intermediates and must be interpreted through either optical printing or scanning, and

every way these are done will yield a different result. In optical printing, two different enlargers would print

the same negative differently and the same is true of scanners. How can anything from a negative be called

accurate when it always involves subjective interpretation?

 

The ultimate real world application of having to match color for color is fine art reproduction. When we

photograph fine art, these days we mostly use a Betterlight scan back, but sometimes we still shoot 8x10 chrome.

The resulting scan from the chrome will be nearly perfect, just like the film appears. If we shoot a negative, no

amount of time spent tweaking color can give us anything as close, and we're experts at drum scanning and color

management.

 

Although there's no orange mask left behind, interlayer masking to improve color is also built into transparency

film but it washes out in the processing. Some transparency film has far more accurate color than others too, so

you shouldn't generalize. IOW, use films like Provia, 64T, EPY or even E100G, fine tune it to a good E6 lab if

you can find one, and don't try this with Velvia or (heavens) K64 which will never give accurate color.

[rob_landry]

The biggest problem with neg film is the scanning. Neg film is perfect for optical prints and is what it was designed for but scanning neg film just isn't ideal. A scanner is an RGB device and the orange mask is tricky to filter out properly; this normally results in an increase in apparent grain. On the other hand, a transparency is perfectly suited and designed to have white light shone through it directly and the RGB sensor has very little trouble interpreting this information. With a properly profiled (quite easy to accomplish) scanner, it's simple to obtain an accurate match to a transparency the first time round. You cannot profile a scanner for neg film.

 

Of course with a transparency, you have the original in hand that you can directly refer to if you need to make any corrections to match the scan to the original. Also, scans from transparencies have much less grain aliasing than scans from negs (orange mask issue). This in turn means that you can use greater amounts of USM to recover the sharpness loss from the scanning process.

 

So optical printing, if you can find someone to do it, is the domain of neg film but if you're scanning, a properly exposed transparency is the better option.

[erik_hattrem]

This is an RSX II 120 slide @100 ISO