p.2 #1 · What is the point of digitally post-processing film?
tzhang4284 wrote:
I’m not surprised - the first roll of film I got back printed from the lab had a different look and feel to what I remembered from my childhood. It is what it is.
I hardly ever got decent results from those labs of old. I'd see the washed out punchless prints, then look at the negatives they returned. The negatives always looked great, so I wondered why the prints were so crappy.
It's because even then their machines are set to the mid tone/grey levels, and so everything printed was auto 'corrected' to that mid level no matter what you were trying to achieve.
Back then I had access to a darkroom and used that for my B&W (the school darkroom only was set up for B&W). My prints were as I wanted - unlike the colour stuff from regular labs.
Fast forward to today - I scan all my film, adjust in LR to get the result I actually want. And when I send the images out to print, I hit that magic button 'auto correct OFF'. Finally, after all these years, I get film prints that look exactly how I want them to look! Thanks to this hybrid digital workflow.
Here is a recent thread comparing film vs digital using the same subject matter:
p.2 #2 · What is the point of digitally post-processing film?
Desmolicious wrote:
I hardly ever got decent results from those labs of old. I'd see the washed out punchless prints, then look at the negatives they returned. The negatives always looked great, so I wondered why the prints were so crappy.
It's because even then their machines are set to the mid tone/grey levels, and so everything printed was auto 'corrected' to that mid level no matter what you were trying to achieve.
Back then I had access to a darkroom and used that for my B&W (the school darkroom only was set up for B&W). My prints were as I wanted - unlike the colour stuff from regular labs.
Fast forward to today - I scan all my film, adjust in LR to get the result I actually want. And when I send the images out to print, I hit that magic button 'auto correct OFF'. Finally, after all these years, I get film prints that look exactly how I want them to look! Thanks to this hybrid digital workflow.
Here is a recent thread comparing film vs digital using the same subject matter:
The processing on those images are totally different with a few having an awful lot of grain and saturation while the other two are muted down with almost no grain. Did you apply exact processing to the images from their respective cameras.
p.2 #3 · What is the point of digitally post-processing film?
The "SOOC" trend has become endemic in photography sadly, with everyone wanting a complete product out of their camera as if that's how it ever was. Fujifilm's simulations have done a lot to push this idea that editing your photos after clicking the shutter is a sign of bad photography. Since darkrooms are far less common than they used to be and most film photography is consumed in a digital format now, people also seem to think film photos were meant to be taken and printed with no editing.
Look at all the editing that happened in the darkroom to get to the final print. Most of us don't have a darkroom these days (I only started shooting film last year so I never had one), but editing your photos is a morally valid part of the process whether you're shooting digital or film. I personally dislike those film simulations since the vast majority aren't even accurate to the film stock they claim to be, but to each their own.
