Keta said:
I thought you couldn't scan film because the colour information is added at the print?
Ohh dear, you have been misinformed, I am afraid: film scanners are no less able than printing machines to compensate for the orange mask on colour negative film, and, indeed, do so quite automatically. Printing machines do make colour and brightness adjustments to the prints to compensate for colour casts or exposure errors, but the same (and fare more) can easily be achieved in Photoshop (or the GIMP, or any other such application).
I have been asking for a long time if I should switch to slide film for the kind of photography I do; supposedly able to capture more information, making for a richer and more detailed image than colour prints can?
Because the eventual result for me is to display it in print rather than on the screen, I want as high quality output as I can get.
Which is preferrable in changing light, fast-moving subject, using telephoto kind of situations??
Slides may be better than
prints at producing rich colours and fine detail, but they are not necessarily better than
negatives: indeed, the negative's ability to have an orange mask that can be corrected in the printing process to help to ensure that the colours are balanced is a boon to negatives. You could always try slide film - modern slide film can be really very good - but, if it is ultimately prints that you want, you are probably better off sticking with print film, and scanning your negatives. Slides are really for projecting (and there is nothing quite like seeing your photograph a meter high by two meters wide in a darkened room!), although people do get good results from scanning them, too.
One of the main reasons that a print is often less richly coloured than a slide is that it has had to go through a second phase of (necessarily imperfect) reproduction (negative to print), whereas a slide only has to go through the one phase (image to slide).
Any means of producing prints will require this second phase, although you can, of course, minimise the imperfections at the printing stage by using high-quality digital equipment. However, if your photographs have to go through
two printing stages (first a chemical/opitcal print, then being scanned, and then printed again), you will definitely lose a considerable amount of definition in detail, tonal range and colour.
Ultimately, there is probably not a huge amount in it between scanning slides and scanning negatives, but there definitely is a huge amount of difference between scanning negatives and scanning prints.
