Traditional or digital darkroom?

[ronald moravec]

Low volumn color printing is expensive. The chemicals have a limited life span and the paper needs refrigeration. I love it anyway and my wedding lab will not do 4x5.

I am slightly into digital as I have 35mm film scanner, flatbed Epson scanner , and a cheap printer.
the Epson was purchased for scanning 4x5 color neg and it has a back light in the lid. Works absolutely great. Photoshop Elements 2 came with both scanners.

The idea was to be able to make proofs between set ups of the color darkroom and also make prints that are difficult in a traditional darkroom such as texture effects, detailed burn and dodging, various other things. I have been sucessful, but the learning curve is long compared to wet. If you can`t get it to work, there is a lot of money spent for nothing.

Wet printing is much easier to learn, but you can do many manipulations more easily with digital.

Another possibility is to scan the neg, do manipulations, and send the file to a laser printing lab via the internet. They don`t care what size the original neg was.

I would recommend Photoshop Elements 2 or 3 as it will perform all manipulations except some very specialised ones, certainly more than you can do in a darkroom.

Last caution, Epson ink cartriges have a limited 6 mo life too. I `m refering to the pigmented colors.

[Shilesh Jani]

Obsolescence - what a dreaded word. Truth is it works ONLY against people who are driven by gadgets, not by results. I work with MF (Fuji 6x9) scanned with a proper film scanner and LF (4x5) scanned with an Epson 4870. On the average, I get equally good results with either combo. My PC is 3 years old (1.8 GHz + 1G RAM), my monitor is 5 years old. I print most of my b/w on a 3 year old Epson 1280 (with custom quad inks), and recently got an Epson 4000 to print both color and b/w (b/w using a $50 shareware program QTR). I have never felt hampered by my old PC gear, yet I am sure the newer ones would be faster, etc. My gear gives me very good 16x20 and 16x24 color and b/w prints.

Good luck.

[Roger Scott]

Seems like a lot of people are pushing the digital route so although I'm in the minority and going against the trend I'll mention that I prefer the wet darkroom for colour. I tried the digital process with the local pro lab and couldn't get the results I was after. This was however with scans/prints from transparencies and not negatives as you're using. I was finding the Ilfochrome prints I did myself from 645 negatives were much better than those obtained from a 4x5 transparency using the digital process. I gave the lab a couple of chances to fix it and even tried another lab without success so I recently acquired a thirty year old 4x5 enlarger and will be able to do my own colour prints from 4x5 transparencies once a lensboard shows up. The question of Ilfochrome availability is probably more applicable than the RA4 process as the latter is still being used quite extensively. Perhaps the only question with regards to the RA4 process future will be the acquisition of small quantities of chemicals or cut sheets.

For comparison the consumables required for digital inkjet printing will be readily available however you will be forced to upgrade computing equipment. Unfortunately disk drives, memory and electronics in general fail and can not usually be replaced with identical items although the cost of replacement is becoming cheaper. Hardware replacement often requires software upgrades as well - which sometimes requires hardware upgrades... Most computers have a useful lifetime of about five years although I have one Sparcstation at work which is ten years old. It lives to serve licenses for a $30k software package and has had one motherboard and four disks replaced. Power supplies for enlargers suffer the same fate however in the worst case I can build one myself and providing you don't have an all electronics auto everything enlarger the only other thing which can really go wrong is a blown globe.

Having said all that ultimately it all boils down to personal preference. You'll justify cost whichever your decision. Choose whichever one will make you the happiest and give you the result you're after.

Regards,

[Scott Fleming]

Hi,

Given your stated parameters ... you're free man! Do only what gives you the most pleasure. I have a digital camera ... it just isn't as fun to shoot. It's like .... not even photography to me. It's something else. I tried medium format. Not enough image real estate. I'm a color man too ... cause I like color. Don't have the room for a darkroom so I farm all that out. I like the output of the digital printers ... Chromira and Lightjet. I like that I have a digital scan and little by little I'm learning photoshop. It's fun ... as long as you don't HAVE to do it.

What I'm trying to get to is ... try it and see if you like it. I'm sure you have a computer. Take a photoshop class. Hire a tutor. Teach yourself ... although it's a tough row to hoe. You can do wonders in the digital darkroom ... but the learning curve is long and steep.

As to the darkroom ... take a class where you can use someone else's darkroom for a while and see if it floats your boat. You may find it more fun than photographing.

One day you may find that you want to sell your work. You say you are not an artist but you could be one and not know it. Once you have a body of work it may just hit you one day that you need to put it on other people's walls. Or others may convince you that your stuff is worth getting out there. At that point all kinds of other considerations come in to play regarding printing. But you probably know that and do not want to let commercial considerations clutter up your life.

[neil poulsen]

I find that some images are best printed digitally and others are best printed traditionally. If you can't do both at home, I suppose go digital. It's a lot of trouble setting up a traditional color darkroom in the home. As for expense for a traditional color lab equipment at home, it's decreasing. (At least for equipment.) I saw a used CPP2 Jobo with a lift today on sale for about $500. Enlargers have also decreased in price. But, then there's the plumbing issue. (Etc.)

For myself, I have a digital color darkroom and a traditional black and white darkroom. For traditional color, we have an excellent u-develop sort of place that's inexpensive and consistent.

[Bruce Watson]

I've tried home processing of color. I found it frustrating and difficult to get to a decent color balance and to maintain it print-to-print. This seemed to be due to chemistry aging (hour-to-hour). When the prints worked, however, the results were very good.

Inkjet printing I find to be easier for me. Then again, I'm an engineer and computer geek, so I feel right at home with computers and printers.

One of the key differences to me is that color wet darkroom printing suffers from reciprocity problems. I've had prints that needed just a little burning in and dodging that resulted in color shifts in these areas. I remember one Cibachrome print (a few years back ;-) that had some ferns in sunlight that I had to burn in a bit - they went from green to cyan. This was, for me, very difficult to deal with. And, it's a problem that is undefined with inkjet printing - just doesn't exist.

Digital printing gives you is the ability to change variables independently. You can change the color balance of the shadows independently of the midtones and highlights. You can change contrast of the colors independently. You can easily build masks and work on parts of the image independently from other parts.

Digital printing also gives you color repeatability. With a good ICC profile for a given printer/paper/ink combination, a given image will print the same every time, day after day. This is very difficult if it's possible at all, to achieve in a home darkroom.

All that aside, you can get excellent results either way. Either way is just a set of tools for you to use to create prints. You'll get better prints using tools with which you are comfortable, I think. And you are the only one who can decide with which set of tools you are most comfortable.

[James Nasuta]

I want to thank everyone for the amazing responses you have given! I began photography in the late 1960s in high school where we did our own processing and I loved watching the image slowly appear on the paper! I just don't think I would get the same "goosebumps" watching an image emerge from a printer. Although I am leaning toward a traditional darkroom because I doubt that I would consider digital to be as much fun, considering the very reasoned responses provided, I will take another look into digital. Since I work for the University of Cincinnati I will pay a visit to the graphics department to see what they are doing and what equipment they have on hand that I may be permitted to play with. Thank you all again for your willingness to help.

James Nasuta

[Bill_1856]

Interesting thought you just gave me, James. It's been more than 50 years, yet I still get a thrill when that B&W print comes up in the developer. It's not the same in color, though. Not only does the entire process take place in the dark and the print comes out of the processor intact, but I gotta wait for hours or maybe the next day before the colors are finalized. No doubt about it -- traditional B&W is just more fun. A lot more.

[domenico Foschi]

The only reason why I still prefer traditional, although I also use digital for commercial purposes, is the sheer process.
When I work on a print using traditional means, I feel the work has more value, the results are truly because of my darkroom skills.
Traditional is a combination of technical knowledge and expensive trials and errors, where in digital, errors are inexpensive( just click the 'step backword' button in the edit menu in your PS.
It is my belief that the forgiving nature of digital would make me a lazier photographer , hence a less skilled one.
In an odd way, digital has confirmed in the right place traditional photography ,which has finally earned the value of a fine craft (when done well).
Digital for me, even though it can reach results that in many instances are superior in details fine tuning , is artificial, there is no contact between the craftsman and physical paper until it comes out of the printer .
Just my opinion.

[John Flavell]

I swore I'd never weigh in on this.............

I'm still in that camp that believes digital DOES NOT replace analog, except in those instances where the photographer has had to pick one over the other--either for economic or "publisher said so" reasons.

I do both. For the landscape photos, nothing would beat the 4x5, scanned then printed on a digital printer. I shoot all black and white large format and nothing I do digitally can give me that Tri-X look I've learned to pre-visualize and work toward. Those little plug ins you can buy to make your digital images look like Tri-X or Kodachrome are a joke and teach you nothing about image selection and image management.

For my job I'm all digital and that's the way it has to be. I can slip a few film images in, but I still have to get them into the digital world.

Also, nothing except my printer is "state of the art", although if it were my workflow would be faster. Soon, I'll have an Epson 4990 for scanning the large format and print those images on a 2200 printer. I'll use a lab if I need something larger.

For large format, I've found that shooting the negs analog and scanning them in is best. It's a hybrid kinda world.