Originally posted by alex.r Pardon me for my ignorance, but when you say "exposure latitude", which slide film does not have, is this being corrected by my photolab when processing/printing? Or is this latitude somehow a characteristic of the film? How does this work?
The nature of negative film allows a lab to make ajustments while printing much more easily than with slide film. An overly thin negative (underexposed) tends to lose detail rather quickly in the thin spots, hence 1 stop under, while a dense negative (overexposed) can be overexposed onto the print, salvaging a lot of the highlight details. With a slide, what you see is what you get. Some slides can be salvaged through duplication, but it is still a much narrower range of exposure that can be recorded.
I am told that part of the reason a negative is easier to print is the orange mask that underlays the image. I have no idea how that works.