Charles Loeven wrote:
"Number one reason for anyone shooting slides instead of negatives is
WYSIWYG*.
I would have no way of accurately judging the full potential of a print
by
viewing the color negative. A myriad of things could be wrong with the
print. I believe that the computer and negative scanner has helped
this situation to a great degree"
I agree.
Based on what I learned over my several years in the pre-press and color
desktop software development business this is precisely why
professionals and commercial printers have almost exclusively used color
positive films. In fact up until just a few years ago there were no
settings or configuration software tables for any of the color negative
films. All of the PMT drum scanners were calibrated to the most popular
E6 and K14 emulsions. In fact National Geographic required all work to
be submitted on K14 Kodachrome emulsions up until sometime in the
1980's. Since they were one of the first color magazine publishers they
got ther start on the early Kodachromes. If you look at some of the
1940's issues of this magazine it has the exact quality of color as
those original Kodachromes. Not surprisingly that color also looked
like the true process Technicolor used in the movie business. This was
the state of the art of color reproduction in the late 1930's all the
way up until the mid 1950's. Color negative films are certainly much
better now and the C41 process has been greatly improved over the
years. However the chromes have more color information than even the
best negs.
It's based upon the density of the film. However unless one is using a
desktop scanner capable of a better than say 3.4 DMAX the average user
will not get that much better performance in scanning slides over negs.
In fact poorly shot slides will be much harder to scan than poorly shot
negs. As the the digital desktop takes over most color work, negatives
will certainly play a larger role in image capture for the press than
they played even 4 or 5 years ago.
Phillip Franklin
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