Electric Slide, Part II
As discussed in a previous post, I recently shot my first roll of slide film. Well, now I’ve shot a second, applying the knowledge I gained from the first roll (to wit, Astia is best shot more or less as metered). I’m still struggling with difficulties in the scanning process; to the eye, many if not most of the slides are beautiful and sharp, with just the right degree of saturation and contrast. My scanner chews them up and spits out muddy scans with weird color casts.
After the last roll, I more or less convinced myself that the thing to do was to bypass Silverfast’s settings, take a totally flat file into Capture NX (my editor of choice, even though it’s more geared toward digital capture than scans) and go from there. I tried that this time, and in some cases, it worked great, but in many — especially where the scene was particularly contrasty — I wasn’t able to do anything useful with the resulting files. I had to go back and re-scan, doing my best with the contrast and, in particular, with the color cast. I’m getting better at this, but it’ll be a while before I can churn out consistent scans that really look the way I want the to — if indeed that’s actually possible with my scanner.
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten my hands on a couple rolls of Ektachrome E100G. In the world of negative film, I’ve always preferred Kodak to Fuji, mainly for reasons of color palette. I’ve also always found Kodak film much easier to scan. Notwithstanding, I really do love the look of Astia, but I hold out hope that Ektachrome will prove easier to digitize. This is important, because my life is substantially digital, and while I’m growing to really appreciate the possibilities of the film medium — and even to enjoy darkroom printing — I really don’t have much use for content that I can’t effectively import into my online world.
Tags: Astia