Yep, how does one get those who have never seen ~GOOD~ color prints to fully understand and appreciate this..
Bernice
Originally Posted by Drew Wiley
Yep, how does one get those who have never seen ~GOOD~ color prints to fully understand and appreciate this..
Bernice
Catalog color transparency work is not that demanding, its more MASS quantity production, get it did...
Color transparency work back then for big Ad stuff was not the same.
Took a quick look at the work of those photographers noted, they are landscape color, which significant color demands might not be that extreme as the metric of reference is ~what~?
Point being, color landscapes is for color effect, not always accuracy of color and other technical demands.
Yes, it is a different world for film based color today, so has the expectations of what color prints are today.
There are those from the oldy-moldy past that remember how different this color stuff once was.
Bernice
I was thinking of the Agfachrome that came in the orange boxes... I totally used the 100RS for 35mm as it was MUCH sharper, had great greens and other neutral colors, but had a devil of a time getting it in 4X5 for my commercial work... So had to settle for EK6117 as it was so neutral... But the Kodak films always seemed to have a biased color palette that I got bored of... But very neutral in good processing...
Steve K
Not all studio still work was what you contemptuous call mere "catalog" work. Some of it was very high cost, high income production, and still is. The transition to digital was not at first a quality upgrade whatsoever, and rather, a bit of a disappointment. That of course improved. But the motivation in the first place to take the wild investment, which initially could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, all on equipment now totally obsolete, is that nearly the entire art department could be dismissed, and that justified the amortization of new equipment. All they now need is a set designer, a cameramen, and someone almost instantly doing the pre-press steps right there on a screen. Food photography is a little more involved, but essentially the same idea. Even much of the same camera equipment is used, with digital backs replacing film backs, and shorter lenses and bellows of course. If anything, the quality still looks a little behind what was once done with film in the hands of an expert. But the gain has been made in efficiency. In commercial applications, everyone wants everything today yesterday already.
Yea!!!! The last really good color I managed to print myself involved bringing a Leitz 1c condenser 35mm enlarger with a converted colorhead to the lab where I worked to feed the Fuji Commercial (punchy color) paper to feed into the RA/4 processor... The CN'S printed looking like 1st gen Cibas with colors you can (yummy) eat... Then Fuji discontinued the type P (portrait softer color) and type C (commercial) punchy color and brought out a paper that was supposed to do both at the same time, but it looked weird to me and a crossover would usually come up... Then the processor went bye bye, so ended my Type C printing... (I can't bring myself to going back to drums after feeding a test strip into the mouth of the beast, then 5 mins of my life waiting for that strip to come out...) I like that B/W keeps one involved through the entire processing interval...
And now the client can watch the camera vision on a monitor from the sidelines, and nit-pik you to "do this, do that"... NOT interested, thank you... :-(
Steve K
Oh dear, I may have derailed a rather pointless discussion on shutter speeds and it's turned into an equally pointless discussion on 1990s commercial product photography, from my contention that the film & related products supply no longer exists, nor do the commercial labs that will process to 1990s standards.
For those who still print from color slides, how fresh are your chemicals and paper and can you guarantee absolutely equal tone and color rendition should you reprint the same slide 20 years from now? Can you reproduce a shot you took in the 90s and have the 2 chromes be indistinguishable to the trained eye? If the answer is 'no', then the supply required for professional product photography no longer exists. Even if we still have chromes and labs that will do your landscape shots.
Actually, It might be a useful primer to this century, as the film makers were under scrutiny by the pros who were very picky about getting consistent perfect results (which required a high level of QA), and this filtered down to happy consumer levels, so a win/win for all...
As far as printing today, the Type R materials are gone, but now with scanning, it has become the destination for materials...
One side I noticed is old sheet film chromes seem to look a little different now, but some I looked at are not fading lighter, but some seem a little darker now (???), but with PS should be no problem...
It's a new world now, but good the "old world" had such high standards...
Scanning certainly isn't my destination, and Type R never was, and I have higher expectations than ever. Current color film and paper quality itself is not disappointing these higher expectations. There might not be quite as broad a selection as before, but what remains includes some very good products. Consumer expectations have always been mediocre. And if the ease of digital imaging has democratized color photography, serious printmakers remain a minority just like they have always been. The computer screen and desktop printer have largely replaced the corner drugstore photo counter, but that fact has very little to do with what can still be done in a color darkroom or thoughtful workstation by dedicated individuals. Even dye transfer printing has been commercially revived and is available if you are willing to pay for it. I've proven that it's possible to make internegatives from chromes of higher quality than ever - maybe not quite as simply, but better. The enemy is sheer laziness, not the lack of materials. Good color printers have always needed a mindset of doing some extra work, no matter what the specific medium, and I doubt that fact will ever change.
Jody - if all I could do was match 90's commercial standards, what would be the point? You're making easy things sound hard, when they aren't. It just takes some commitment. I saw an old 1940's Kodak Dye Transfer advertisement that told people how easy it now was to make their own home color prints. Everything is relative. Then Ciba made things ten times easier, but was still somewhat pricey, needed masking, and had certain idiosyncrasies. I got good prints the first day I tried it, and was making collectable prints within six months. But now people whine and gripe how hard it is to make a mask, but they're willing to spend endless hours sitting on their butt attempting to clean up and doctor things in PS. And by the way, we don't call them slides, but chromes, unless it's 35mm in a slide mount. And yes, old chromes can be printed any number of ways. If they've faded or gotten mildewed, of course there will be restoration issues. I've seen 1940's 5x7 Kodachromes that look like they were made yesterday. In the past year or so I've reprinted 4x5 chromes from the 70's via internegs to very high quality standards. I've done 35mm slides considerably older than that, and some of my brother's 4x5 chromes from the early 60's. No problem unless the original is somehow blemished. I neither scan nor use PS. It's all darkroom.
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