Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/06/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Speaking as the production manager of a good-sized ad agency, it will be a very, very long time before digital cameras make film obsolete. It's an issue I face reguarly. My rule of thumb, based on experience, is that digital images can be enlarged about 25% before pixilating and other image-degrading artifacts become objectionable, or the time to correct those artifacts makes the cost of using the photo prohibitive. Some of our art directors even find as much as a 50% enlargement acceptable. But one art director here shot an entire catalog digitally a couple years back. The photographer delivered beautiful 4 x 5 scans. Then the art director needed to double and triple the size of some scans for full page images and for use across double-page spreads. Once he saw what he would get, that art director faced redesigning the catalog or reshooting the large photos conventionally. He hasn't done another digital photo shoot since. Conversely, if I had slides or tansperancies of those images, I could scan them to whatever size I needed for comapratively little cost. There were some prime examples of the problem in the sports section of the Kansas City Star over the last couple of weeks, with photos from the NBA (National Basketball Association) championship series. Pictures obviously shot digitally were enlarged to cover two-thirds the width of the page. Pixelization was obvious. The gradation of tones was so poor the images almost looked posterized. It was difficult to distinguish some of the faces in the images. I've written previously how quality standards have fallen in advertising, but we would have found these images totally unacceptable. We often download scans from stock houses over the internet. And as long as that scan is being used no larger than 4 x 5, give or take 25%, it works. But as soon as the image needs to go larger, we will contact the stock house to have a slide or transperancy overnighted to us. Then we scan that photo to size. And it's not unusual for us to enlarge a photo to fill a 25" x 38" poster. Those scans, at the resolution we require, are 350 to 380 megabyte files. I'll not pretend to be up on digital cameras, but I suspect that's larger than most can accommodate. Add in the cost of the time to do color corrections on and to proof that size of file, and we're clearly better off choosing a slide or transperancy with colors we like and making it the scanner operator's responsibility to deliver a comparable scan. Again, I speak from experience. A year ago another art director provided digital images for a series of posters. That photographer gave us large digital files with photos red sepia toned. The art director wanted neutral grey images. The cost to correct and proof those files ran roughly $1000 per poster higher than the cost would have been to scan conventional photos to the art director's specifications. Digital photography has its place, especially in news photography (assuming editors can be educated on how large an image can be used. No offense to you, Eric; I'm sure you know. But editors here in K.C. clearly don't). But conventional photography has its place, too. Perhaps that place will become more limited, but from where I sit, it isn't going away anytime soon. Larry