scott_eaton5

Works wonders with film scans as well. Color neg film in particular can lack micro detail because of it's lack of density range, and I've used tone mapping to extract 'realistic' detail from neg scans when I should have used tranny film in the first place. I'll try to find some examples.

Given the decrease of photo-centric art competitions, I'd love to see what folks are displaying and winning awards for. At least in my region you rarely see photo contests anymore, and if you do they are mixed in with other 2-D and often 3-D media. That's fine with me....things got WAY to pretentious in the late 80 's and 90's and I'm seeing much more creativity now. In my opinion, completely ignoring someone work or contribution is just as ill-mannered as self exaltation. Total 1,000% agreement. Last time I checked photography was a communicative art form, and if you've noticed there as always been a group that doesn't like that.

Unlike the computer you bought in 2008 today's desktop PC's have a much longer production life because hardware has evolved much faster than software demands. I'm running a 5yr old i7, and with 16GB or RAM, $100 video card and SSD for the OS runs as fast as I need it and will support any display I desire. Unless you're chewing through 4k video editing you really don't need the latest and greatest desktop, and like new refurb i7's can be had for a steal. This is one reason why profits in the Desktop computer industry are declining so fast, and that's because you can legitimately get 5-7 years out productivity out of a desktop. I use an SSD for my OS and Apps and regular spinners for bulk data. As SSD prices continue to dive soon that will change.

However, HDR / Tone mapping can also be used in a subtle way to increase dynamic range a bit without drawing attention. I typically use the HDR / Tone mapped image and then layer mask it with the original. A good example is the snow shot below. I used HDR / Tone mapping to bring up the shadows a bit and produce an image like my eyes saw it.

As mentioned prior in this thread tone mapping is really doing the heavy lifting when it comes to HDR. I don't even bother with multiple exposures because with proper tone mapping technique and a really clean base image (and proper photoshop layer masking) you can get 90% there. Multiple exposures just gives you the data, and if presented in a tone range mapping to a single exposure looks pretty bland. Taken to it's extreme HDR / Tone Mapping produces some crazy stuff. I use it sometimes to create 'dreamscapes' like the carnival shot and are meant to be over the top and abstract.

This type of software is used mostly with high end or large format printing. It's not used for smatphone shooters to make their pics look like LF capture backs. One advantage the RA-4 based labs have over smaller ink-jet based printers is the front end RIPs are really, really good on Lambda's, LightJet's, Fuji's etc. I've printed 40x60 murals off these things well below 150dpi, and they are tack sharp provided I'm handing them a detail full file. When you have a $10,000 software package upsizing it's makes all the difference. However, with a large format ink-jet printer you are pretty much stuck with native DPI, or tricks in Photoshop which aren't that good. Yet another reason RA-4 dominates large format printing while the poor ink-jet guys have to pester clients to upsize their files ahead of time. This type of software allows you hit a 360dpi from a much lower rez file and gain the most out of the mechanical resolution of the printer. When I'm selling a large print to a client I don't want to see upsizing that's anywhere like bicubic. As for the Zapruda footage that's more likely to go into some type of photoaccute type algorithm which extrapolates information from sequential images. That type of processing is used all the time in court proceedings.

XP-2 excels when shot at around EI 200 and used under moderate to high contrast situations. Like all C-41 films XP-2 has a very, very long shoulder and is basically impossible to over expose because of the super high lattitude of color neg films. Outside on sunny days, studio portraiture etc XP-2 does very well and will produce very lush highlights that anything but the best handled conventional B&W films will turn into a gritty mess. It also pushed a stop very nicely. Helps perk up the contrast. Where people screw up with XP-2 is under expose it, shoot it under low contrast situations like over cast skies, and/or subject it to minilab processing and expect fine art results. It's also not happy when shot on variable contrast papers above grade 3 because color dye clouds tend to get very harsh on multicontrast paper. Printed on graded paper and over exposed a tad it was a gorgeous medium to work with. About as close to old verichrome as you'll ever get. Because it didn't have that stupid mask that Kodak T-400CN did you got a bit more density range with XP-2. Getting dmax or dmin has nothing to do with 'silver' or anything else. It's using the appropriate film for the brightness range of the scene, and if using conventional B/W film adjusting processing accordingly. Expose for the shadows / develop for the highlights. Unfortunately XP-2 is pretty much locked into one contrast range. Underexpose it under low contrast lighting and you'll never recover it.

Those spots are 100% processing. Likely backsplash. By the shape looks like the film was curled over a roller at that point.

Sandy - What's annoying is 100 strangers can point their smart phones at a kid on a slide in a park all recording at 4k and nobody bats an eyelash. I pull out my dSLR and point it at the sky in the opposite direction and I get suspiciously gawked at. If social neurosis are going to be present, I at least request they be applied uniformly.

Formaldehyde was still in use until the middle 90's. I was still mixing it up, and 25gallons of stabilizer warmed up to 90F or so required a frikken respirator to work around.. Were was OSHA when you needed them so we could at least get some better ventilation. E-6 color developer part B was bad enough. Not aware of any discrete hardner going into C-41 or E-6 lines I worked around, then again we were dip n dunk. To combat scratching during proofing we used optical sleeving.

Back around the financial bubble a friend of mine was flipping houses and asked for help getting some furniture moved on a house he was turning over. Seems the owner had just died, his wife had died years earlier, and having no kids his neice was heir to the property and just wanted to get rid of it. Under some mattresses we were moving I found a box of pictures. Basically the couple's entire lives from the time they met until they died stored in that box. My friend I was helping appreciated the nostalgia, but indicated the neice wasn't close to the couple and would prefer to have the contents of the house burned if it would get it sold faster. That kind of person. I left the pictures, but moved them to a more respectable location. If you have younger ones to share do it while you can.

The tint is likely from the scanner...not the film. I doubt you have/had regularly calibrated film profiles and slopes for your scanner, so the color tint is just an abstract. Likely caused by deviations in the light source multiplied by tiny variations in the film base, etc. Big reason some of the commercial scanners I worked with had $10K software packages for profiling.The fact your scanner was grabbing good scans from conventional B&W film and it 's only a smidge off is the most important thing.

The term A.I. is thrown around so loosely it's become a pop culture term with little technological bearing. The fact is that A.I. doesn't exist because we haven't invented technology capable of producing a true A.I. Humans create these things called algorithms that we mockingly call A.I. because if we close our eyes and turn our brains off we can pretend it's actually thinking. No piece of computer code no matter how advanced has ever done anything other than process instructions. A true A.I. will have to be achieved via some miraculous base in hardware, not software. Software by definition cannot produce A.I. but simply simulate complex processes via algorithms.

Actually if the zombies realized how much luddite drool was in this thread they'd have run for the nearest salad bar. Floppy drives and Rosetta Stones. Yep, next we'll be discussing the best way to keep kids off your lawn. Disaster recovery is one specialty I provide consulting for, and with today's technology you have to go out of your way to lose data. If a truck drive's into your server room and over your storage array then you should spin up copies of your servers in Azure, AWS, etc. Or, your offsite location should be doing real time block level replication. Data is now all virtual. If you don't have those then the problem is not with technology. I've never EVER lost data with a RAID 1 or 10 topography, and even when the controllers have literally caught fire. Parity RAID went out with VHS - don't use it, or fire your sysadmin that is. And stop using tape as a backup because it's cheap. That's another hysterically failable storage format I'll refuse to endorse or sign off on. During last year's Hurricane Armageddon season the number of homes and small businesses that got destroyed and/or flooded just in the continental USA alone was staggering. Imagine for a second how many boxes of family pictures / negs and slides got wiped out. Yet not a single commercial data center in Houston lost data or went offlne for any appreciable amount of time during the height of that hurricane. Boy, I'd sure feel better having hardcopies of images in a box in a basement in a hurricane zone than digitized and stored level 3 data center - not. When I want to view Russel Lee's priceless photography of the U.S in the 30's and 40's I go online and view it. If I want to watch Citizen Kane I stream it. I'm sure there are hard copies of Lee's slides and negs and a film transfer of Citizen Kane stored in a vault slowly back into their component molecules top their component chemicals, but I don't have access to it. This accessibility in a nutshell is the real issue because certain people hate the fact digital images in film or video is so accessible. They want medium to count more than content, and make these straw horse technological arguments against digital anything because their old Win98 computer blew a HD once. Storing digital copies is a non sequitur because it' really a analog -vs- digital debate with the same players. They aren't listening. The real answer to this question is if you want your photographic work to survive 1000 years then maybe you should create content that society deems valuable enough to preserve for 1000 years.

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What looks good in a magazine print doesn't always appeal to projection, or scans well, or makes a workable R-type print. Kodachrome for instance was a terrible medium for making Cibachromes because of it's short tonal range and abrupt highlight transition. Yet Kodachrome is a legend in magazine print because of those same characteristics. My archived 120 Fuji chromes look as good as they day I processed them. Can't say the same for Kodak E-6.

I've seen them....but most of the people I sell metals to don't want them. They cost more than the print. I know a lot of people who work in framing and matting and if you talk to them it's surprisingly a science from their point of view. Second primary color in the image is supposed to match the outside matte color, etc. Or do I have it backward. Period in the late 90's when minimalistic euro type framing was the thing. Basically you sandwiched your image in glass panes with no border, so you had negative space. It tended to work well with full frame 35mm B&W where you showed sprocket holes, but then digital shooters started added shredded/faded edges and it all kinda went to heck at that point.

Lately I've been selling a lot of metal prints, and for the longest time couldn't figure out why they bugged me in some way. It was because I'm used to framing my higher end prints I've sold with a typical matte and frame. With metal and acrylic prints becoming so popular I had to wrestle with the notion I was complimenting somebody' s furniture in some fashion because there rarely is a border. I compromised by promising myself some images I just won't put on metal and some will stay on cotton/rag and framed accordingly. Then there's the onslaught of 4x5 polaroid transfer prints in the 80's and 90's with two feet of white matte on either side of the image..........I know what that says about the artist, but this is a family friendly forum.

The vast majority of remaining labs that print film scan it first; Fuji Frontier, etc. So, the odds are it gets digitized, and all Frontier type machines can do grey scale at the push of a button.

Tarkovsky's works are a pain to get in terms of good transfers. Its a real crime. The slit screen stargate sequence and expressway sequence from Solaris side by side. Would have never though of that. Excellent video - thank you.

Or have the lab add some cheezy light flares and lower the contrast and just say you were playing with a new instagram effect :) The B&W option gets a high five from me. You cant balance notch filters with print film like you can color temp differences. Then again anything is possible with photoshop and plenty of coffee.

Because the zombies need brains.....BRAINS! :-) Seriously....if civilization falls to the point digital copies of digital capture are no longer viable nobody will give a $%^& about somebody's street shots of whatever.

Most 15k drives I've worked with don't live long enough in high production environments to notice :-) Twice as fast, twice the heat...twice the wear and tear. SSD's to the rescue. Fun pulling them out of hot swaps though when still running and feeling the torque.

The yelling is mechanical energy that causes the HD case to vibrate and this vibration gets transferred to the actuators that read/write information onto the HD platters. There are sensors on the actuators that detect the unwanted motion and data reads and writes are supposed to be suspended vs risk corruption. All kinds of mystery patents on how this works. This was a big problem in the early 2000s to teens as HD density rapidly increased but design tolerances didn't until recently. What didn't help was the Satan known as RAID 5 was still common in SAN setups. Essentially motor vibration from dozens of 10k drives would resonate in some enclosures and usually knock out the top tier of drives because vibrations were strongest there, and RAID5 wouldn't tolerate dual faults at once. Bang....data volume gone, and mysteriously in pairs with RAID 5. Drive makers have claimed newer SAS drives have better dampening for this problem. With more companies moving to cloud and SSD and local storage taking over smaller on prem server duties it's far less of a problem anyways. I still cringe when I hear EMC and RAID 5 in the same sentence.