Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]- ----- Original Message ----- From: "JMWoo" <wooismyid@yahoo.com> To: <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2001 6:41 PM Subject: [Leica] Digital: how to output? ........ > 3) Are you ever outputting to a film? The luxury of > being able to do most of my adjustments in Photoshop > and then output a negative to print traditionally onto > my favorite Ilford paper intrigues me. I thought this is/was a good idea. However there are a lot of pitholes. Film recorders (I have worked with) have the following problems. 1. Calibration: Very difficult and you will have to do this every day with every film type/developer you intend to use. 2. Flare: Regardless of which film recorder you have, your white's will flare into the surrounding blacks. 3. contrast: will increase. 4. colour: a)If 1. is not correctly carried out you will end up with a colour cast that cannot be filtered out during the printing process. b)If 1 is correctly carried out you will ALSO end up with a colour cast that you cannot filter out (but not as bad as 4a). 5. Linear: Film is not a linear medium (black to white), a crt is not a linear device (black to white) and therefore a film recorder is not a linear device. Your subtle differences in grey tones will not be recorded in the way you expect. Dark details and/or whites will block depending on how good/bad you carried out step 1. 6. Film recorders come in various resolutions, typically 2k, 4k, 8k or 16k. This is how many _pixels_ there are in the greatest dimension of the film used. 2k = 2048 pixels, 4k = 4096 pixels etc. Therefore regardless of the size of your digital image a film recorder will resample your file to "fit" your image to the size of film used and the recorder's resolution. A digital image dimension is based on pixels/inch, This is not so with a film recorder. The image size is fixed. 7. The end the result WILL be disappointing. Summary To obtain anything like constant, predictable results you have to calibrate, calibrate, calibrate. No only your film recorder, but also your film processor and your printing process. Film recorders were designed to expose positive material for slide show presentations where "quality" is a lesser issue. As a means of producing quality prints from a digital image, film recorders don't offer the "quality" you may expect. After all the calibration the result(s) will still be dissapointing. There are no ICC profiles available as most film recoeders work with look up tables (LUT's), which is just another word for calibration. Conclusion You will be dissapointed with the end result. John B