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Home >> Photography >> Digital Digital
Prints vs. Darkroom Prints
I recently had an opportunity to work with and edit some scans done via Nikon's top 35mm film scanner, the Super Coolscan 4000 ED. The premise for the scanning session was to see if it made sense for myself and other wedding photographers to buy into a top of the line film scanner and professional grade inkjet printer such as the Epson 5500, to produce enlargement prints for sale to our clients (assuming the number of print requests justified the costs). Now, I did not have access to the $6K CAN Epson 5500, but I feel my Epson 1270 is quite capable of producing excellent photographs (yes, true photographs and not merely photo realistic), so I was not concerned about it not being able to print accurately what I fed it.
The test scans were provided to us courtesy of Broadway Camera and their demo sample of the Nikon 4000 ED. Each scan took a few minutes to complete and of the four scans, three were with ICE and one without and all scans had some multisampling but not 16X due to lack of time and tolerance for waiting around in the store that long. Afterwards, we copied the scans to a Compact Flash card and later burned them onto a CD-R. Since I was the one with the photo printer and the smoking new Pentium 4 with a gig of RAM, it made more sense for me to process the scans and edit as I saw fit. The scans were…well; they were disappointing because the Nikon 4000 ED seemed TOO good at resolving every detail on the film, including the grain itself. Traditional optical prints done via an enlarger at a local pro lab were also done and comparisons between the two will be provided further down this report. What this all comes to is that the Nikon 4000 ED (from my very limited experience) is an exceptionally powerful scanner and one that any film shooter is going to love having in their digital darkroom. HOWEVER, only if you shoot slow and super fine grain films such as Velvia or Provia 100F or perhaps the slower color negative emulsions such as Fuji NPS 160 or Kodak Portra 160. A shame that we did have those films to test scan but shooting ISO 400 and 800 films is a more real world example of how wedding photographers work with 35mm and even medium format gear, especially when shooting in dark churches. The underlying grain of those faster films came through exceedingly clear and seemed like boulders to my eyes. Now, I knew that ISO 800 and ISO 3200 films are going to have grain but it surprised me at how grainy even NPH 400 looked as well. The grain was what I saw on the monitor and when I printed out the images via the Epson 1270, there was no hiding from it. The printer did not smooth it out or render details less clear and if anything, details that I did not detect readily on the monitor the first time around, revealed themselves clearly on print. Once again, the 1270 is an excellent printer that provides you with an honest rendition of what you give it. If a photographer really wanted to reduce costs to scan and print on their own, their Photoshop skills had better be top notch to work with the grain and reduce its effect. Unfortunately, my own skills with Photoshop doing such is not at the level that I was able to produce a better looking image than the original scan so far as grain is concerned. The Nikon 4000 ED also had less color saturation in certain types of clothing so a boost in the Saturation controls would help. Oh yes, for those interested in a film scanner, no matter what the make or brand, make damn sure it has ICE technology. This is an amazing piece of software and hardware technology that will save you countless hours from having to spot a scan of dust and other grungies that are scanned in by the super sharp lens and CCD. The one test scan that did not have ICE turned on resulted in a near three-hour session going over the image at high magnification to Rubber Stamp the dust particles out. Save yourself the hassle and ignore the scanners without this technology as standard. I did not detect any meaningful softness imparted onto the image by using ICE. In fact, most of the prints were done so without Unsharp Masking applied, because doing so would have made the film grain even more objectionable. The GEM or grain equalization and management did weird things to the scanned image and altered the color cast significantly enough that we went without it. However, in hindsight with the amount of grain resolved by the 4000 ED, it is something that should be looked at more closely to determine its true value in the scanning process. The file size and resolution capabilities from the 4000 ED are amazing. A basic scan of a color negative film frame resulted in an over 60 MB file size and with ample capabilities to produce a 16x20 at a good print resolution (240 dpi). Certainly, I had enough in reserve to print a full size 12x18 inch print at 300 dpi and smaller 6.5x10 prints had over 600 dpi resolution (not that the Epson 1270 would actually use all that resolution). However, not all is a bed of roses with that high level of resolution. Again, my earlier point about using the finest grain film is being reiterated here because unless you want to see boulders in your print, scan only the good stuff. Comparing
Optical to Digital As it turned out, I was not wrong in my conclusion and viewing the traditional prints made me realize that as good as digital scanning is now, for certain types of prints, optical is superior to digital. Certainly, some of the wet prints had grain (how can there not be with TMAX 3200) but they were less objectionable than the digital prints. What I saw in going back and forth between the two was that the digital print was covered to a degree by digital noise and what I thought were grainy boulders was in fact a mix of film grain and digital noise seen in dense and continuous tone areas of the prints. The wet prints were also better in the delineation of facial details in the group shot sample in which the subjects were relatively small as Larry took a wide shot at the alter, to reveal the church surroundings. The wet prints showed what could be done in the hands of a skilled printer working in a professional lab. Not having the original proof prints left me in the dark so to speak in terms of colorcast and I went with my own judgment. My judgment kept the digital prints conservative whereas the lab prints burned in details where they were needed and any color casts that showed themselves on the proofs were neutralized for a vibrant and rich looking print. Therefore, first conclusions in comparing the digital to traditional prints were plainly obvious in favor of traditional printing methods. Upon closer and more detailed examination, I found the grain from my digital prints to be really, not that bad in certain areas and what seemed to make the difference between the two methods of printing was just colorcast and saturation. However, again, in dense shadow and continuous tone areas, the digital grain and noise was bettered by the wet print. This testing process made me wonder how much of a factor the 35mm format was and would a film scanner with 120 color negatives fare better. I think it would, seems kind of like a no brainer but until I have an opportunity to try out a medium format film scanner, I can offer no real conclusions. I think if we had done full 16x over-sampling of each scan and perhaps used Vuescan with its large number of negative film profiles, we would have received a superior looking scan with less noise. And that may have made the difference in this round. I also wondered if shooting slide film would be a better option for film scanning and printing. I hear or read too many examples of pros and amateurs alike scanning their chromes and obtaining excellent results for printing but then these people are generally using super fine grain Velvia or Provia. Larry showed me his 4x7 feet (!) promotional print done via a Lightjet printer and it was breath taking. Moreover, the original shot was merely a 35mm slide of Kodak E100S. Digital certainly has the potential when done right but of course, depressingly expensive. Conclusion The digital scanning workflow to put it bluntly, sucks! Sitting and scanning before one can even edit the image is not fun and God help you if you cheaped out and bought a scanner without ICE. The digital workflow from a digital camera is faster and easier however, if one is a wedding photographer shooting digitally, any digital workflow is going to suck compared to just being able to:
All of the above after shooting the film represents fairly minimal work on behalf of the photographer. A little bit of traveling and gas to go to the lab as well as editing the duds but even if you shot 20 rolls of film, the editing should not take that long (a full day perhaps). Compare that to a potential digital workflow of 700 plus captures,
Obviously, the editing process is going to be onerous when dealing with hundreds and hundreds of images. Unless your name is Denis Reggie or Gary Fong, you are not likely to have assistants at your disposal to do the mundane editing for you while you schmooze the clients for bookings or better yet, are out shooting and earning more money. This topic has gone back and forth between Larry and me as to how to make the digital workflow faster and at least as easy as shooting film. It all seems to come down to time and how much you have of it to spare outside of photography. If you have a lot, then digital could work for you but if you do not then film is probably still the better choice because others do all the work in developing and proofing. What we both agreed on is that scanning a 35mm film negative and then printing is not the right way to do digital and attempt to reduce costs of custom or even machine prints done at a pro lab. There is nice potential but the workflow is not right for either of us, and the results overall are less than that of traditional darkroom prints. If you have good Photoshop skills, scanning and printing yourself might just work out for portfolio books or presentations but I would be hesitant to pass them along to clients (remember I'm talking about scanning ISO 400 and 800 color negative films). However, after doing some printing and testing via file captures from a Nikon D1x and Canon EOS 1D, I would have no hesitation in presenting those digital prints to clients as being true photographs. Disclaimer Post
Script Since the original Scanning on the Cheap had been written, Ed Hamrick of Vuescan fame updated his great scanning software to allow editing of digital captures. After spending a few minutes, figuring out just how this was suppose to work, I managed to get the digital capture into Vuescan for editing. I also tried editing the digital capture via Photoshop only. In both instances, I came away disappointed by the quality of the capture from my test frame of Fuji NHG II 800. The orange mask is a brutal thing to workaround in either case and I was not happy with the amount of grain that was visible too (or digital noise - take your pick). The cheap method of digitizing film works surprisingly well with fine grain slide films but less well with grainy color negative films. The only way I became semi satisfied with the test image was by turning it into a black and white image and then adding a Sepia tone and messy border to it. After that bit of editing, the grain from the image worked to its favor to provide an antique look to it. This technique may work better with slower, fine grain films such as Fuji NPS 160 or Kodak Portra 160, however, I am losing interest in working on this technique and refining it further. Horses for courses and color negative films should be done "wet" for best results in enlargements. |
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