Originally posted by LesDMess Unfortunately - or fotunately, there are intermediary steps to the final presentation whether it is for web or print. Take for instance the same frame of Kodak Gold 100 film below scanned automatically on a Noritsu machine and the Coolscan below with no pre or post intervention.
Noritsu
Coolscan
Another example of straight-up automatic scans with no pre or post this time of Kodak Ektar 100 scanned by Epson V700 and Coolscan.
I have not optically printed color film but as I understand the process, it requires the operator to intercede in it's production to achieve a "true" representation.
Of course negatives require more interpretation than positives.
For documentary or news publication, I can appreciate minimal or no material intervention but I believe there is still color and contrast adjustments applied.
Mmm in these cases it's difficult to say which is the "best" scan because I wasn't there when you took these pics, personally I would like to see something as neutral as possible, for you which scanner gave you the "correct" interpretation of your pics?
---------- Post added 12-21-14 at 12:55 PM ----------
Originally posted by filoxophy Cuthbert, I've appreciated your input and liked many of your photos. But please give up this "My photos have no PP" conceit! As Les so obviously shows, that's simply not the case! If you don't want to add anything and you're happy with how your lab scans come back, fine, cool. But just remember there's processing there, too.
This is what you say, the people who actually did these scans said otherwise, most of them are unexperienced and have no clue about PP and I am inclined to believe them, sometimes I am happy with their work, sometimes I am not at all.
I conclude saying that for me scanning is just a way to share the pics online, and that's the way I intend to do that, I prefer to check the negatives or the slides to understand if it's a good picture or not, but of course it's not possible to publish online something straight and a digitalisation is necessary, but IMO it should be as neutral as possible without any attempt to improve or manipulate the results....if I were fine with that I would simply go DSLR.
---------- Post added 12-21-14 at 01:06 PM ----------
Originally posted by rob1234 God, you're frustrating! In getting an image from your physical negative on to my screen, a load of interpretation has been done. Just because you haven't done any of the post-processing, that doesn't mean none has been done...!!
I'm a mechanical engineer and part of my job, especially when I was a researcher at the university, is doing tests.
Of course if I take a measurement there is a long chain of "data processing" from the physical thing to the final result on the monitor, but in order to have realiable results the so called transfer function of the chains should be as close to 1 (no intervention from sensors, datalink etc...) as possible. If your gear "interpretes" the results thne you have data contamination.
For me the same applies to pictures, what I want to see is what's on the film,not how the scanner "interpretates" the data.