Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave Do you mean the two beach photos in the original post? Then I'm afraid I have to disagree.
Yes.
Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave The first photo looks like the output from a scanner, which is exactly what it is. Strangely, many film shooters nowadays seem to have decided that the look from a scanner is somehow the "authentic" film look. And of course that's nonsense. The authentic look of both colour and B&W negative film is a wet print made in a darkroom, and the authentic look of slide film is the slide itself.
Now I must disagree. It is not nowadays, but it has always been so. If you look at, for example, a slide film, you see directly how it looks. If you scan and have a different look (not calibrated scanner or digital shot) it is not normal. The darkroom print should give the same look as the film itself, or it is then an art scan/print. All films have a different look. If you change that look, you could then use any film to have such manipulated look.
Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave It's completely normal in wet printing to use a variety of methods to get the best possible result from the original negative -- to do what you might call "analogue post processing". So surely it's equally legitimate to use digital post processing to get the best result from the negative too.
No it is not. I use only digital post processing to remove dust spots, add a signature and make a reduced copy for flickr. Sometimes I change a little bit the contrast, but no other process.
Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave DSLR "scanning" is simply a different (and in many ways better) method of making a digital copy from film. The comparatively dull output produced by most home scanners isn't the "authentic" film look at all -- it's a look that all too often makes the results of film photography far worse than they should be.
A scanner can do that better, when calibrated. A 48 bit Tiff file has more information in it than a 42 bit raw file. You have also multi-exposure in Silverfast or Vuescan for more dynamic.
With negative films it is even more complicated, because the interpretation of the reversal process must be calibrated to have always the same result with the same film.