royfisher

Nikon D3, Nikkor 200/4 AI

How about a "Madonna of the Cups" crop? (That sunburn on her nose looks like it's starting to blister.)

Of the liquid kind...

Not to mention that digital is analog at the same step in the process that "analog" is digital. Even more confusing, when an analog ("digital") image is converted to digital, it is called "digital"; but when a digital (film) image is output on digital media (photo paper or scanned), it is referred to as "analog." Referring to film as "analog" used to bother me until I realized a basic distinction: Film images can look pretty darned good--superb in the right hands--but "analog" images usually look like crap.

Ahead, Warp Factor 9! Family photo scanned from a 620 Kodacolor negative taken in the late 1950s. The warping of space was apparently caused by storing the box of negatives too close to something that was hot enough to buckle the film.

I used RawTherapee and ART. ART is a derivative of RawTherapee, and some of the tools have different features. With RawTherapee: I used log tone mapping to set the black and white points and to increase separation of the darker values, then soft light to increase the midtone contrast, and a little dehaze to increase local contrast. Then adjusted the mid-tones using the gray adjustment of the log tone mapping tool. Also cranked up the saturation to 30. In ART: Added a vignette with the center positioned over the town, and removed some of the more distracting bright spots with its spot removal tool. Back in RT: Darkened the edges with a vignette, darkened the sky with the grad filter, and brightened the image a little using exposure compensation. The sky turned out to be less than satisfying. I was trying to make it look more ominous to lend a sort of "big government vs. little town" vibe, but that would probably take some layer work with a pixel editor. At the pixel level there are a lot of "worms" in the original image that look much like the artifacts produced by a "smart" sharpen tool that is adjusted too high. They might be (or might be contributing to) the noise that was referenced above.

...which, after a few months, turns into a bright red eyesore. (Previously inflicted.)

With RawTherapee: darkened the image with some negative exposure compensation, warmed up the white balance to look more like a Fall afternoon, boosted the colors a little, increased the midtone contrast, added dehaze to bring out more blue in the sky, added a modest vignette, and a lot of crop. Then used Gimp to remove the sign on the fence and the stray cloud above the tree. The image was beginning to look oversharpened with that much crop, so I ran it through Nik Color Effects Tonal Contrast to soften it a bit. Moonrise, Gaasbeek Castle Reflecting Pool, September 2018

At least we know where the people who designed VCR user interfaces found jobs after the demise of the VCR.

What that reflection of your hand taking its own selfie says to me, as someone who is trying to analyze the film processing anomalies, is that I can't believe anything in that picture. What is actually there on the film and what isn't? The image of your hand takes up *half* of the frame; your phone covers a little more than that and adds some ghosting of its own (or does it?) and other bits and pieces of itself. The leprechaun's hat buckle, for example, is perhaps the lens bezel (or is it some type of chemical stain?). You've identified four potential stages for the source of the problem: film, camera, processing, and washing and drying. Have you made any attempts to methodically isolate which one is the culprit? Have you examined the film with a loupe? A real one, not a cell phone app. That should reveal definitively whether the streaks are light leaks or liquid marks, or perhaps some of both.

In the top frame of the negatives shown in post #2, how did that hand print get there? On the right side of the frame there is an obvious ghost image of four fingers and part of a palm. If they are not yours...

Those symptoms usually signal that a hard drive failure is imminent. My suggestion is to buy a new SSD, pronto, and clone your existing system drive while it is still working. If the drive is duplicated successfully, replace the hard drive with the SSD--your system should work like new again (and probably be faster than when it was new). Then you can take your time while shopping for a new machine. System-size SSDs are typically priced from around $100 or so at local discount stores, and many of them include the cloning software.

150mm Apo-Ronar on a Fuji S5.

Taken with an experimental homebrew analog rig back when film was film and analog wasn't.

... Grandfather (1.4x)