When it comes to my prints, I’m never really happy. There’s friction, always. As a result, I’m always searching, and this search takes me all over the place. In this case, I find myself on that decades-old divide of film or digital. No ‘versus’ debate for me – I hope we’re all past that point. But the question is still with me: how do the different processes translate into the final print?
Beware: this is not going to be a (quasi-)objective, methodologically rigorous, tightly controlled experiment. What I’m interested in is a practical workflow and the possible end point it takes me to. No clinical lab setting – this has its use to understand how things work and can also help in exploiting characteristics of materials. But in this case, I really wanted to look at things as I would normally do them – intuitive, dirty, explorative and without proper controls.
So here’s what I did. I took a camera (a Canon EOS 30v, arguably the most practical film camera ever made by Canon) loaded with Kodak Vision3 50D, with just a few frames remaining on the roll. I also took my old Canon 7D digital camera. I put a 50/1.4 on the 30v and a 15-85 EF-S on the 7D. Like I said, this is not going to be a pixel peeping exercise. I just wanted a convenient way to get roughly the same field of view on both systems.
I set the 7D to JPEG – I might (and really should) have shot in RAW, but from a practical viewpoint I find myself shooting JPEG much of the time on digital. I dialed in Canon’s ‘faithful’ preset after having briefly done a few quick snaps in the field to see what setting would come closest to how I experienced the colors and contrast. I set the white balance manually in a similar way – matching the little screen preview to the scene in front of me.
The film was processed in ECN2 developer for 3m30s at 41C, so slightly overdeveloped to fit the contrast of the negatives to what RA4 paper needs. I scanned the negatives on an old Flextight Precision II, and optically printed them onto FUJIFILM DPII Matte color paper.
I ended up selecting two images to work with – neither of them very thrilling scenes or compositions. Just things I ran into on a chilly late March afternoon. Here are the original digital files as taken from the camera, with no additional editing:
They’re kind of dark, but since it’s digital, I opted to steer clear of blown highlights.
Here are the corresponding frames on the digital ‘index sheet’ I generally make and file together with the negatives. Color balancing on such a preview is very crude (and there’s lots of dust etc.). Note that I make the index sheet with my Epson 4990 flatbed, but the digital scans I used for the actual prints were made with the Flextight instead.
From this point onward, I chose (quite deliberately) to prevent being influenced by the different images while working on the prints. So I took the digital files, and processed them into printable versions. Then, a few weeks later, I did the final scan on the negatives and processed those into printable versions, too, without looking at the digital ones I prepared earlier. I then printed both sets as they were, without doing further tailoring on the prints as such.
The digital prints I made onto generic gloss/satin RC paper. I used my trusty old Epson 3880 for the inkjets, loaded with 3rd party (Cone / InkjetMall) inks. I then (last night) also made optical enlargements of the negatives onto FUJIFILM DPII Matte paper. Again, I did not look at the inkjet prints when making the optical enlargements. Instead, I color balanced them they way I would any image – although I admit to putting a little more effort into trying to get it ‘just right’ this time. I did not spend nearly as much time or effort on the natively digital captures. Bad boy. As said, it’s not a clinical comparison.
So this gave me 3 prints for each image:
- a native digital image printed on inkjet,
- a ‘hybrid’ image acquired on film and then inkjet printed from a scan of the negative, and
- a fully analog optical enlargement.
I’ll include the digital files for both the native digital capture and the scanned film images below:
What’s immediately obvious is that the native digital images are significantly heavier. I attribute this to priming/bias: since I start with an overall darker image (not trying to blow out highlights in exposure), apparently I remain primed to an overall heavier end result. This is particularly visible in the power pylon image where I allowed the trees in the background to drop away into deep shadows.
Conversely, the initial inversion I make from a scanned negative is always very flat – which is also by design, since I don’t want to lose anything in that part of the process. As a result, I end up with an overall more muted tonal scale.
Mind you, none of this is by necessity – it’s just what apparently happens. And it’s just the kind of thing I was looking for, too: process characteristics that influence the end result, with me being the factor the mediates between these points.
Let’s look at the prints already. As said, there are three of each image. I struggled with presenting them here on a web page. The flatbed scans were all crap – have a calibrated profile for FUJI RA4 paper for this scanner, but not for the inkjet paper I used. Consequently, the colors on those were all over the place. I ended up simply photographing the prints side by side with the 7D. It’s the best I could do without making this really involved and complicated, and I accept that it’s still a compromise born from convenience. The photos below lack much of the vibrancy of the real prints. You’ll have to imagine that bit.
I’m not sure (yet) what to say on the differences and similarities, apart from that I see both. Whether you’d want to qualify the differences as ‘subtle’ or ‘dramatic’ is quite personal. I’m bouncing between both – on the one hand, I’m quite surprised that the final prints end up being quite similar in many ways. At the same time, if I look a little more intently, there are so many differences that it’s just difficult to start to list them all. And of course, this is just one possible version of each print, out of an infinite number of possibilities.
There are one or two things that stand out to me, as the maker, and with the benefit of being able to see the actual prints in front of me.
For the power pylon image, I feel only the analog print has succeeded in capturing a very critical color nuance that attracted me in this scene in the first place. It’s virtually invisible in the digital versions shown above, so you’ll have to take my word for it, I guess. In the shrubs that stick out of the yellow grass, there’s this very subtle purple-magenta hue that forms a pleasing contrast with the surrounding grass. This nuance is lost largely in the negative scan, and it’s entirely missing in the native digital shot. I don’t think there’s anything inherently problematic with digital in that it cannot capture or render this – it just didn’t come out in this case, the way I made this print.
For the farm image, it’s the inkjet print of the scanned negative that appeals the most to me, because it captures the atmosphere the best, with its subtle and muted palette. The native digital image is simply too contrasty. Again, it’s something that’s easy enough to solve – but I didn’t end up doing that and apparently I needed to be reminded of what the scene could look like in the final comparison. The optical print here is too saturated, color-wise. It’s kind of nice in its own right, but too friendly and vibrant. I realize now that this print would have worked so much better on something like FUJIFILM Crystal Archive Supreme, or just plain Crystal Archive (a.k.a. ADOX Color Mission). It would have ended up much closer to the inkjet print from the scanned negative.
I also took a smartphone shot of the whole family of prints:
Smartphones spice everything up – a bit too much, as in this case. And yes, there’s two more prints. I’ll ad them add them as a bonus. I didn’t capture that scene digitally, so both of those prints are made from a negative – again Kodak Vision3 50D. I made an optical enlargement (left) as well as an inkjet:
The optical enlargement is for the most part a little darker and more saturated, although the latter is in part (not entirely) due to the former. The most important difference is that the sky is much more cyan on the optical print. I actually prefer the sky in the inkjet print, but the foreground renders much more true to how I remembered the scene in the optical enlargement.
What to make of all this? I’m really not sure, yet. One thing is very clear: the optical enlargements take far more time to make than the inkjets. I also didn’t really put in any decent amount of work in optimizing the inkjet prints – there’s so much potential there that I’ve not even touched upon, especially for these particular prints.
One more thing stands out, which is something I’ve set aside for the most part in recent years: the potential of a hybrid print: i.e. a digital print from a scanned negative. They never made much sense to me – the purpose of a negative is to be able to enlarge it, and there is still an intangible (perhaps inexplicable) appeal to an optical enlargement that an inkjet print just can’t touch. At the same time, having gone through this exercise, I actually quite like the ‘hybrid’ prints I made, as well as the process of making them. Maybe it’s not so silly after all.
But while saying so, I also realize that this may have a lot to do with the fact that I just haven’t put a lot of effort in understanding and working with digital photography over the past 10-15 years.
In the end, I’m still kind of torn where to go with my color photography in particular. How to balance the different aspects of the process and the end result? Where can technology help me get the result I want, and where am I limiting myself in adhering to certain principles? What road(s) to take in the next months, or even years? I’m just not sure yet. But I do feel having gone through this exercise helps in some way. If only I knew how, exactly.