Slide film...

[james_ashby]

<p>Hi, so i just brought some slide film, partly because it was slow and partly because it was cheap, can i get it printed like normal film or is it just for slides? Can i assume that everything else is the same as normal colour film?<br>

Cheers</p>

[ted_raper1]

<p>Slide film is a first generation image - when you send it in for processing what you get back is the actual "negative" mounted in plastic or cardboard. With film, when you send it in, the negatives get developed and then prints are made from those negatives - a second generation image, in other words. You can have prints made from the slides once they are developed. <br>

Slide film must be more carefully exposed because it does not have the same latitude (tolerance for over or under exposure) as print film. Print film can be over or underexposed when the image is made and you will still get acceptable prints. Not so with slides! </p>

[garydem]

<p>you can get slide film printed, but it will be more expensive. slides were made to be developed mounted and projected. i shot slides for 32yrs, and still have the projector and screen. i have scanned a lot of my slides into the pc using a nikon coolscan v with terrific results.<br>

in taking the pics with slides. the best advice i can give you is that slides have a very simple tollerance for error=ZERO. if you overexpose the slide is done, you get no info. likewise underexposure. slide film also have the narrowest dr of any recording medium, digital or film. the dr of slide film is about 5 stops, and that is it. you exceed the 5 stops on either end and you have a slide to throw out. the dr of slides is even narrower than jpeg. so you really have to know what you are doing to be able to consistantly shoot good slides. slides have to be shot right in the field, plan on using slide film as though pp did not exist, because once the slide is shot nothing can be fixed.<br>

the reason we used to shoot slides is the same reason that it is so hard to use. you get exactly what you shoot. no more and no less. and there is no pp of the slide in its origoinal form. obviously if you scan in a slide to the pc THEN you can pp. but of the slide itself, no. if you do not naiul the exposure perfect in the field then you obsilutely have no second chance. but slides also have some virtues. this why you bought slide film by the case and stored it in a second refrigerator. slides have known and absolutely repeatable color. every shot taken in the same light will look exactly like any other shot. this is why the fashon shows and new car ads were shot with slides because the shooter knew that they would reproduce the exact color every time.</p>

[waltflanagan]

<p>Where are you going to get it developed? If you're in a reasonably large city I suggest looking for a pro lab and ask if they do E6 (slide process chemistry)</p>

<p>In the past slides were printed using an expensive process called Cibachrome or a cheaper R-type printing method. These days virtually everyone uses a Fuji Frontier or Noritsu machine do scan, adjust, and print. These machines can scan both negatives and film although some labs may not have the proper try to handle a mounted slide, but even my local Walmart can scan and print slides.</p>

<p>As said before you've got to get the exposure right for slide film but nothing beats looking at a slide on a light table or projected well. The best part about slides is you see a positive image and if your print is bad you know whether it was you or the lab. That's why I gave up color negative film years ago.</p>

[bernard_korites]

<p>As a slide shooter myself, I take a bit of exception to some of what Gary says above. While what he says may be literally correct, in my experience you do not have to be afraid of shooting slides because of exposure issues.<br>

Gary says "you exceed the 5 stops on either end and you have a slide to throw out". While that may be true, in normal use you may under or over expose a slide by a stop or less, but that does not necessarily make it unusable. I have hundreds of Fuji Astia, Velvia and Provia slides taken with all sorts of cameras including cheap point and shoots and the lowly Nikon FM10 yet I can't remember having a slide that was unusable due to incorrect exposure in years. I was in Paris and Switzerland last year and shot 8 rolls of Astia with a Leica Z2x p&s, shooting more or less at random, indoors, bright sunlight, rainy days, even night shots from the top of Eiffel's tower and I did not throw out one slide because of exposure problems.<br>

Gary also says "they would reproduce the exact same color every time." There are big differences in color between Velvia, Astia and Provia, for example. Perhaps Gary means one roll of Velvia will give the same results as another roll of Velvia, assuming both have been cared for the same way, and that is true. Part of the fun of slides is choosing the one that will give you the colors you want in different situations.<br>

Getting stressed over colors is somewhat meaningless anyway because the slide will eventually have to be viewed through some sort of projector , viewer or light table and the color of that light source will have more impact on the final colors than the pallette of the film itself. The same is true for scanning.</p>

 

[swilson]

<p>

<p>I think Gary’s point about color is that with slide film you are going to get the colors from the film and lighting and so you should pretty much know what you are going to get when shooting. With print film you are at the mercy of the person doing the printing, have two different people make a print from the same negative and you will likely have colors that don’t match between prints.</p>

<p>As for scanning I have found that I can have one setup for scanning slides and be happy with the colors, with negatives I have to adjust a lot between rolls. And when I scan slides I can tell if I am getting the color correct by comparing to the slide, I can't do that with a negative.</p>

</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>As indicated, it is called "slide" film because it makes <em>slides</em> , not prints.<br>

You CAN get prints from it, but you CAN also go from San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of Kansas City. It's just not the way to go efficiently.</p>

<p>If you are scanning into digital imagery anyhow, it doesn't make too much difference, but slide film <em>is</em> less tolerant of bad exposure on either side. Slow slide films are very low grain, but-with the exception of Kodachrome (now discontinued)-you can do as well with fine-grain color negative. Color balance for a digital image is not such a problem since you can do what you will with the image once it's in the computer. You can even buy plug-ins that will automatically process an image to emulate different film emulsions.</p>

[profhlynnjones]

<p>Not great for conventional printling but great for sacanning and inkjet printing.</p>

<p>Lynn</p>

[garydem]

<p>to scott and bernard-when you bought slide and had the intention of using it for critical application you bought by the case and stuck it in spare refrig. you also paid attention to the lot and batch number on the film to make sure that it all came from the same run. later this would guerentee that the shot would come out in the same colors every time, as long as the case held out. this why you stuck with same brand type and lot and batch numbers. i shot ektachrome 64 which gave a slightly different color than kodachrome or some other slide film. but within the brand type lot and batch group the results were absolutely the same. if you shot fashon or car introductions over days the last thing you wanted was the colors not matching what you saw and do it with inconsistantcy. if it occurred you no longer had a job. as far as one roll of velvia giving the same results as another roll of velvia, true. BUT ONLY if you got the 2 rolls with the same batch and lot nunbers which meant that they came from the same processing run when made. if they didnot there could be slight differences in the colors. small but there. this is why if you were serious about the colors you bought the slide film by the case. as long as the case held out the colors would all match.<br>

the above meant that you were in control of what you shot and you got known results. with print film you are at the mery of the printing tech who may por may not know what he/she is doing and that tech knowledge varied with the tech. the offset was with print film you could messup pretty bad and the print would still look pretty good. that was becuase the printing tech saved it for you in the printing process. in this print film and raw have a lot in common in that the shot can be messed up in the field yet saved later one way or the other.<br>

as far as exposure is concerned, i go with what i said above. slide film has zero tollerance for error. if you overexpose even by a 1/3 of a stop then the slide film itself goes clear and shows no detail or anything else. the acual overexpose tolerance is closer to zero than a 1/3stop. when i started with slide film a lot of yrs ago i threw most of what i shot out simply because they were shot incorrectly. over time i got better. by the time i quit with slides, i was getting at or near 100% correct slide exposure. it was simply something i did not worry about. i expected a correctly shot slide, and got it. but now for anyone who is used to digital, especially the raw shooters, shooting slides would be an extreme challenge. simply because with digital, raw, you know that if you have an error in exposure there is the photoshop and the raw converter later. with slides you have to shoot it right 100% or in some way the slide will show an incorrectly exposed image. if bernard got no errors, well nether did i, but it was very very easy to do. and the slide's image paid for it with unusable highlights or too much shadow and blacks showing no detail. becuase of the very narrow dr, you shot for the not blowing the highlights and left the rest to fall where it may. the only alternative was to try to find and use some way of narrowing the scene's dr to make it a better fit with the slide's dr. reflectors, fill flash, split nd filters, etc. or just plain shoot the slides in a stiudion with known and controllable light conditions, and many slide shooters did.</p>

[bernard_korites]

<p>Gary-<br>

You wrote - "slide film has zero tollerance for error"<br>

Surely you intend that to be a hyperbole. Even the rankest number theorist would have to conclude from it that nobody has ever, or will ever, achieve a correct exposure! It seems you have had some critical applications that required unusual control of film and exposure. Maybe I'm just too easy to please but I think for the average slide shooter, no more than normal control of parameters is necessary. </p>

 

[david_henderson]

<blockquote>

<p>for the average slide shooter, no more than normal control of parameters is necessary.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Sorry, thats wrong. Slide film's can often offer no more than 4.5-5 stops dynamic range. Neg films are often about double that. And there are many , many occasions when you can't fit a scene onto slide film without some help :-grads, fill flash, being two of the most frequently used. In short, slide film is much harder to expose correctly than neg film. Its harder to squeeze scene contrast onto the medium as i've said. But its also the case that even a half stop difference in exposure makes objects look visibly different. That said, with sufficient experience and care in metering it is clearly very possible to expose slide film well - to the point that there are a lot of serious photographers , including this one, that elect to use slide film all the time or almost all the time. Frankly though I would expect your first few rolls to contain more than a few mistakes. </p>

<p>Can you make prints? sure but you have to make slides first (E6 process) and then scan the slides and print from the resulting files. Just about any minilab should be able to do this. Sadly though many minilabs are set up primarily to handle print film and they may not be as good or as cheap as prints from neg film. The results are likely to vary from lab to lab so its worth trying another if the first time doesn't impress you. Again though bear in mind that many prints you see in top galleries started off life as slides. There are excellent high end scan and print routines which will make you very good prints indeed - provided of course that the original slide is perfectly exposed and sharp. </p>

[kari v]

<p>Minilabs do well when the slide is well exposed but their auto-all up-the-contrast process has problems with shadows.</p>

<p>Go out and shoot. You'll figure out slide film with couple of rolls. You can use a light prime lens as a loupe. Images look great and lively even in 35mm size.</p>