Photographs from Digital or Film Cameras

Film vs. digital seems to be the topic du jour in photography. About 20 years ago it was 35mm vs. medium format, 10 years ago the issue was black and white vs. color, and a mere five years ago it was 35mm vs. APS.

At the core of all these debates‚ is one common theme: making the task of image making simpler.

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Both the film camera and the digital camera are tools that, at best, help you produce images, but don’t in any way know what to photograph. That’s the human part.

Step one is image capture. In the analog world, the ability to accurately record images is the product of the chemical make-up of the sensitive layers of dyes and silver on the film.

In digital photography, the number of pixels and the amount of available chip storage determine the accuracy and clarity of the image.

Step two is image fixing. When I first learned photography, I studied B/W film processing and learned how to alter the film image through the development process. Longer development was a way to increase the contrast of the negative images.

In a similar step, digital photography images are stored on small, floppy disc devices called Smart Media or Compact Flash memory cards. These images are raw digital files.

Step three is the manipulation of the image. With print film, manipulation is done in the enlarging process where a combination of filters, exposure time, cropping and other techniques alter the image.

This step doesn’t exist in slide photography because the film in the slide is the film that ran through your camera and what you see is what you get. To manipulate a slide image you need to scan it to create a digital file or to make a negative of it.

Today, this manipulation step is where digital and film technologies overlap. More photo labs are using devices like the Fuji film Frontier printer to produce color prints. These machines print color photos from either digital files or negatives that are scanned to create temporary digital files.

At home most photo manipulation is done on your PC through a photo program like MGI Photo Suite or the program that turned into a verb called Photoshop by Adobe. I am amazed whenever I hear someone talking about “photoshopping” their ex-spouse out of their wedding pictures. To photoshop, is one of the first program names to become a part of our language.

Matching color on your prints and monitor

If your prints just don’t look like what you see on your monitor, try ColorVision’s Spyder software to calibrate and match color.

Whether you are working with a raw file from a digital camera or one produced by a scanner, these programs allow you a great deal of control over the final image. Full-blown programs like Photoshop 7.0 (which sells for about $600) are used by professional designers to produce magazines and books and can be very daunting to the home user.

On the other hand, some of the programs that come free with scanners and cameras like MGI Photo Suite are too “dumbed” down for most serious uses other than making small, quick prints.

A new version of Adobe Photoshop has recently been put on the market. Photoshop Elements 2.0 (price around $100) looks like it might just be an intelligent way for most photo users to successfully manipulate images. It’s a blend of the best elements of big sister 7.0 and the ease of the old PhotoDeluxe.

The final step in photography is image output. While most photo manipulation programs can fix lots of problems in your photographs, most people have trouble getting their prints to match what they see on their computer screen.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that most of us are running PCs that are patched together from a number of different sources. Rare is the individual with a Banana-brand camera, Banana-brand PC, Banana-brand scanner and a Banana-brand printer.

The reality is a mixed bowl of fruit and invariably there are glitches in the transmission of data between them. The other reason for glitches is the printer.

Most low-end printers (under $200) have two ink cartridges. One has three color inks and one is for black ink. Today’s better printers may have four, or like many Epson printers, six ink cartridges, and produce extraordinary prints.

Rather than continue to debate which is better, film or digital, Canon or HP, perhaps we need to shift the debate back to the imagery itself. Back to seeing and thinking photographically. After all, a gorgeous print of a badly photographed necklace is worthless whether it was done with a film camera or a digital one.