Paul Weyn wrote:
For me, there’s a romance about film that I just can’t get with digital;
but having said that, there are advantages to mixing both in processing:
Because I market my images on-line, I make hi-res scans of the negs, do
my darkroom editing in PS, then send to my lab for printing. The quality
of the final printed image is excellent - as good as optical with
today’s technology, and the consistency from print to print is awesome.
I also bypass the longevity problem completely because I still have the
negs.
While for me, there's kinda a romance about digital that's just missing
with film. But then, computers have been my life's work, mostly paying
for the photography (it pays for a little of itself now and then).
I find the prints I can make from digital far better than what can be
achieved optically. You can only do so much dodging and burning in the
length of time the exposure takes, and the precision with which you can
do it is also limited. And I never got to the point of using contrast
masking in my darkroom printing (which was mostly B&W, anyway). And,
yes, the consistency of multiple prints is much better, and the ability
to make matching prints in different sizes is *immensely* better.
People might be interested in Galen Rowell's article on his conversion
to digital printmaking. Go to
<http://www.mountainlight.com/articles.html> and search down for
"World's Best Prints" (from *1999*!!!). (I can't find a way to make a
link directly to the individual article; something fairly clever seems
to be happening.)
As for longevity, I'm counting on digital scans to preserve my ephemeral
chromagenic color images. I'm seeing clear signs of changes in my older
Ektachrome slides, and some of the color prints I got from my mother are
simply not restorable as color images.
My prints these days are either of the same longevity as current prints
from negatives (made on the same materials by my lab), or else
considerably MORE stable (according to independent testing laboratories;
Epson pigmented inksets at the moment).
Some stuff is just a matter of personal preference; the "romance" part
for example. But I think, in many objective ways, that digital color
*printing* is just clearly better in all ways than darkroom printing
(with chromogenic materials; last I heard from Ctein he found dye
transfer printing from negatives still did a better job in the shadow
tones, and the prints look pretty convincing to me).
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/dd-b
Pics: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum,
http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
