<p>I am thinking about getting back to film photography. Back in my high school years in 1990s, I could develop my own B&W film and make traditional optical prints using an enlarger at home. For the color film, I just took pictures, then brought the film to the lab to develop and make prints. I have never knew for sure how those color prints were made, but I assumed there was a printing machine passing the light through the color negative (using the color correction if necessary) exposing the color photographic paper, then the prints went thought the developer and fixer, were washed, dried and then the prints were ready. Correct me if i am wrong. As of today, to my knowledge this process is not available anymore. At least, I don't know any commercial lab in the US that does that kind of "wet optical printing". Nowadays, they will develop the film, then scan the negatives and then either print them on an inkjet printer as digital files, or use the LightJet or the <a title="Durst" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durst#Lambda_and_Theta_photographic_printers">Lambda</a> <a title="RGB" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB">RGB</a> lasers to expose light-sensitive paper, which then gets developed. Even though the labs keep on calling the second process "traditional optical printing", it is not quite traditional, because it's not the negative itself, but its scanned digital copy is printed. So, does that mean that we no longer have a true analog color printing available? Does that mean the scanning is an inevitable step between the color negative and the print? My understanding is that in such a case the quality of the scanning determines the quality of your final print. Do we loose something, like the dynamic range, colors or the unique "film look" because of the scanning? Or maybe scanning is actually an advantage, because now we can color-correct the film scan in the Lightroom or Photoshop? Please, share your thoughts.</p>