Until this summer, I'd pretty much only every shot black and white negative film. I had some experience with color negatives, but not too much, and they are easy to scan. I'd also shot some black and white C-41 film, but that's also easy to scan. Traditional black and white film is less easy to scan, but it's fine, and I can print it in a darkroom.
However, slide film is a horse of a different color, and Kodachrome is the most different. I bought a few cheap rolls of Kodachrome to shoot this summer before Dwayne's stopped processing it. I wanted to see what all the nostalgia was about, and I (wrongly) believed that scanning wouldn't be too much of an issue.
The slides came back from Dwayne's and looked pretty good, for the most part. I think I went overboard on the "meter for the highlights" recommendations and so a lot of them are quite dark. Even so, they looked pretty good in a projector, in a viewer, and on a light table. However, maybe because I didn't grow up with the kodachrome look, I really can't see much that is different or special about the color.
I began scanning my kodachrome slides in the first week of September, and there are only about 150 ones decent enough to even bother scanning, so I figured I'd get it all done pretty quickly. I plugged the Nikon Coolscan 5000 in my university's library into my Macbook Pro and fired up NikonScan.
They looked terrible, and after two hours long sessions fighting with the scans and trying to fix them in Photoshop, I gave in and bought Vuescan. I can get decent results with it, really usable scans, especially after color tweaking in Photoshop and Lightroom, but even so, I've only just scanned the last slide, eight 3-hour scanning sessions later. Slides needed rescanning, I needed to decipher the mysteries of Vuescan, I needed to figure out whether to use infrared cleaning or not (the answer is no, even with the Coolscan 5000).
I can firmly say that I will never shoot slide film again. You pay lots of money (film+processing+shipping), you waste tons of time (scanning+spotting dust that Vuescan can't clean without visibly harming the image+fixing color), and, in the end, my results aren't all that special. Some people here have done wonders with Velvia, and maybe I could try that, but since I don't own or often use a projector, it's probably beside the point.
So, it's back to good old Tri-X for me. I can print it in a darkroom and it loks beautiful. If I need color, I think the best option these days really would be a DSLR [dreams of graduation presents]. I'm going to scan many of my parents' old kodachromes next, but archival of times past makes sense; this kind of effort for new images just seems a waste to me.
</rant>
If you want some of my leftover kodachrome for cheap, check out my marketplace thread here:
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/photographic-equipment-sale/117499-sale-5...ll-frozen.html
Last edited by jzietman; 10-08-2010 at 12:06 PM.