What do you do with your slide film?

[Boscoe]

Now Ilfochrome has long gone, I believe an equivalent doesn't exist, I wonder why I would shoot slide film. I do love Velvia but processing is a hassle especially if I'm just going to scan it for the internet as I don't bother projecting slide. For me I much prefer printing and framing images.

What's your ideas? Is there an alternative to Ilfochrome?

[richardman]

I am a heretic for making this statement, but I have always processed my own films (B&W, slides, negs) and then scan them and post process that way. I love Provia for that workflow. Velvia is slightly more challenging. Color inkjet printing (sorry I said a bad word) is also quite remarkable, quality wise.

[evan clarke]

I threw 2000 sheets away

[Heroique]

...I wonder why I would shoot slide film...

Hmm, I suspect you've never seen a well-exposed transparency on a light table?

Magical – and no scanning or projection necessary. This can be a justification by itself for 4x5 slides and larger, I think. It's enough to eliminate the perception of processing as a "hassle."

However, projection can also be affordable, easy and stunning w/ an old-fashioned overhead projector and quality screen, such as the "Da-Lite" brand.

[richardman]

Oh ghod, yes, looking a transparency, or just hold it up to a bright sky is... MAGICAL.

[lenser]

Think of being in a grand cathedral and being captivated by the magical stained glass. There is nothing else I know to describe it.

[vinny]

I drum scan them and make prints. I don't know why you wouldn't do the same.

[djdister]

Aside from or in addition to the esthetic quality of a large slide, I think they scan better with less adjustment needed than color negative film.

[angusparker]

Aside from or in addition to the esthetic quality of a large slide, I think they scan better with less adjustment needed than color negative film.

Agreed. No guessing what the color should be!

[Boscoe]

So generally people are happy to scan I see. I can't really afford a good inkjet unfortunately.

[Liquid Artist]

So generally people are happy to scan I see. I can't really afford a good inkjet unfortunately.
If your anything like me these days where I do 1 or 2 inkjet prints a year your better off to use a drum scanning service, calibrated monitor to edit the files and have the file printed at a professional lab.
If I had a printer the ink would dry before I used it next, and costs more than the cost of a print at the best pro labs.

Oh two things.
Always save the image in the same colour profile the lab uses.
Always tell them "No Corrections"
If you don't, your prints may look as lifeless as the next persons.

[BetterSense]

I don't know a lot about digital or color in general, so this might be a silly question.

If you scan a transparency and use a calibrated monitor etc, then can you get a similar-looking print out of lightjet-type prints as you can inkjets? Based on the examples I've seen, I agree that inkjet prints can be super good, but I am wondering how they differ in goodness from machine-printed RA4.

[pj1860]

When I want to use slide film, I just use it, get it processed then do nothing with it (apart from occasionally showing the slides to people telling me I need to go digital - Velvia 50 tends to end that conversation). At some point in the future maybe scanning will get better or cheaper. If that day doesn't come, someday at least I can really bore my family with some slideshows. If that day never comes, hopefully at some point a relative of mine rummaging through my stuff some distant day in the future will be pleasantly surprised by a shoe box full of transparencies.

[Liquid Artist]

I don't know a lot about digital or color in general, so this might be a silly question.

If you scan a transparency and use a calibrated monitor etc, then can you get a similar-looking print out of lightjet-type prints as you can inkjets? Based on the examples I've seen, I agree that inkjet prints can be super good, but I am wondering how they differ in goodness from machine-printed RA4.
A calibrated monitor should pretty much look exactly like the print, if you saved it to the right colour profile and specified No Corrections.

If you have someone scan them for you on a drum scanner, I can't see why they couldn't save them in the correct profile for you. For that matter they may be equipped to print them in house.

As for PJ1860, The last that I heard Fuji doesn't like us anymore. They stopped making Velvia. I guess that they got upset with us making their digital cameras look bad.
I sure wish I had some.

[siuling337]

Thanks for the sharing.

[polyglot]

Mine sit in a sad little box with all my other negatives. Sometimes they get looked at, but there's not much else I can do with them. I have scans for posting on the web, but cannot afford a scanner nor printer that can even vaguely approximate the quality I can get in an optical print from 4x5", and when was the last time you saw someone run a LF slideshow in their house?

So I switched to C41/RA4 for my colour. Big optical prints from LF Ektar and Portra 160 are pretty nice to put on the wall for those of us who don't have a stash of Ciba materials nor wish to spend our lives making masks.

[Drew Wiley]

Lightjet prints are onto RA4 papers, so have a different look than inkjets. They can even be made onto high gloss material to resemble a Cibachrome. What is best
depends on your specific image, the kinds of colors involved, and your personal taste.

[kintatsu]

So generally people are happy to scan I see. I can't really afford a good inkjet unfortunately.

I use Fotohaus Zacharias in Regensburg. The print, both film and digital, to Fuji Crystal Archive Supreme HD for Digital Premium. It's a silver based paper, not inkjet. No ink, it's traditional RA4. I calibrated my monitor to their printer, then whenever I get digital prints, they're right. I'm sure there is someplace near you that will have something similar. Scan then print that way. The price here is 1 euro per print for 8x12, and the colors are sweet.

I definitely plan to get some 4x5 and mf slides printed that way. There is also a place by Stuttgart that still does Ilfochrome, so I'll try that too.

[Drew Wiley]

Velvia might look good on a light box, but it is a pain in the butt either to scan or print because of the very high unforgiving contrast level. With Ciba it often required first a highlight mask to protect the sparkle of the highlights, then a sledgehammer .90 density contrast mask. Since Ciba printed very slow to begin with,
that was a massive amount of light needed for any significant degree of enlargement. But if you can't afford inkjets, you certainly can't afford the alternatives.
Only way out of that dilemma is to print directly from in-camera digital, or switch to color neg film and print it yourself onto RA4 paper in the darkroom, which is
probably cheaper than printing on high-quality b&w silver papers.

[dave_whatever]

I don't know where this myth that Velvia is hard to scan comes from. If exposed correctly it's a doodle to scan, and certainly much easier to produce a file with beautiful consistent colour than colour neg film!

[Jim Andrada]

I used to think the same thing about transparencies being easier to scan, and last time I looked I had close to a hundred sheets of 5 x 7 Provia and about a hundred rolls of 120 Provia in the freezer.

Unfortunately(?) I discovered that Ektar 100 scans beautifully as long as it isn't overexposed so it's what I mainly use for MF and 4 x 5. And I chipped into Keith Canham's group buy for 5 x 7 Ektar 100 as well.

Still love the look of the Provia, but have been VERY favorably impressed with the Ektar.

By the way, 4 x 5 and 8 x 10 Provia 100 are still showing as available at Yodobashi Camera in Japan. 8 x 10 transparencies are really impressive!

[alexn]

I love my 4x5 transparencies.. Even the ones a little too far under or over exposed for scanning are remarkable to the naked eye when on a light table... There is nothing quite like a big transparency.. I scan my slides at home, the best ones get drum scanned and printed...

Jim has a point too... I have in the past year discovered that when carefully exposed, Ektar 100 gives me very very good results for scanning and printing with more range than slides with similar strong color.. Still, if I had to pick either C41 or E-6 for the rest of time, I'd have to go for E-6

[alavergh]

As somebody who hasn't seen a large format transparency, I would think the ultimate goal of photography is getting an image on paper or at the very least, something that's displayable. Even framing it with a light behind it...except I thought I read that constant light would degrade the dyes or whatever is used to give chromes their color (was it Kodachrome that used dyes?)

I've always heard that slides are easier to scan in terms of color,I've seen some wonderful digital files from 4x5 slides, so I'm sure a print would look great made from a quality lab.

[Richard Johnson]

I think people who shoot chromes believe they are easier to scan... you haven't heard from negative shooters in this thread so it's preaching to the choir.

Basically the model workflow for chromes was to match the look of the chrome, and because it has a shorter range it is relatively easy to match with the scanner on auto-pilot. That's the way it was done since since the 50s, first with process cameras and later with huge drum scanners.

Color negative has a much greater range and when you scan it you have options, there is no "correct" exposure and the scanner operator or artist is faced with making decisions how to interpret the image. This breaks the old school photo reproduction model that many of the older traditional photographers grew up with but it has a lot of creative advantages -- you aren't locked into the simply reproducing the chrome. Just like a B&W neg in fact.

Color neg also gives you 12-14 stops of photographicable range as opposed to 5-6 with chrome. I've shot (tens of) thousands chromes as a pro since the early 80s but I'm glad to leave chromes (and Ciba and everything related) behind. Back then we (all of us, as an industry) needed to do 1/3 stop brackets, careful lighting, and tons of test Polaroids to give clients scannable chromes so I have to laugh when I hear of amateur nature-backpacking photographers shooting chromes without brackets in natural light... leaving tons of detail behind but making pretty pieces of stained plastic for the light box.

[dave_whatever]

you aren't locked into the simply reproducing the chrome.

You aren't locked into reproducing the chrome when shooting chromes either!

[Drew Wiley]

I'm trying to pin down internegatives, but making them costs way more than just going out and shooting a fresh color neg - and I'm already accumulating way more of those than I'll ever have time to actually print. But there are some very special 8x10 chromes I'd like to still print. Otherwise, any of my post-Ciba chromes are pretty much doomed, except for a handful I'm prepping for dye transfer printing, maybe possibly one of these days, if I get the time. But even if certain of these option hit a dead end, it has still been worthwhile because it's given me an even broader grasp of advanced color masking etc, which has already come into play printing color negs themselves. I'm very encouraged, at least as long as Kodak is still making color neg sheet film, and Fuji is making the paper. I figure my odds are pretty good at least until I'm too old and arthritic to print color anymore at all. I really dislike the pasted-on, stencil-like look of saturated inkjet colors. Prefer the transparency of real dyes.

[towolf]

Guy on German LF forum describes the 9x12 Epi-Diaskop projector from "VEB Bildwerfer" (http://www.grossformatfotografie.de/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12137&p=88450&hilit=bildwerfer#p88457) he found

[jnantz]

i love putting slide film between 2 pieces of glass and hanging it in a window ..
the sun illuminates it like stained glass, and its new every day.

[StoneNYC]

I don't know where this myth that Velvia is hard to scan comes from. If exposed correctly it's a doodle to scan, and certainly much easier to produce a file with beautiful consistent colour than colour neg film!

Agreed +1


I used to think the same thing about transparencies being easier to scan, and last time I looked I had close to a hundred sheets of 5 x 7 Provia and about a hundred rolls of 120 Provia in the freezer.

Unfortunately(?) I discovered that Ektar 100 scans beautifully as long as it isn't overexposed so it's what I mainly use for MF and 4 x 5. And I chipped into Keith Canham's group buy for 5 x 7 Ektar 100 as well.

Still love the look of the Provia, but have been VERY favorably impressed with the Ektar.

By the way, 4 x 5 and 8 x 10 Provia 100 are still showing as available at Yodobashi Camera in Japan. 8 x 10 transparencies are really impressive!

You can still buy Provia100f and Velvia100 from B&H in 4x5 AND 8x10 ... No need to buy from japan...