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Heard a guy at the camera shop say he scans his negatives at 4800 dpi and then 'cleans them up' in Photoshop.
That means he's editing the digital file, which completely misses the point of this community. We share the straight shot from the film, the story behind taking it, and that's it. Has anyone else had to explain this basic rule to someone new?
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keithward3mo ago
Read a blog post once that nailed it. The writer said scanning is just a translation step. You're moving the image from film to screen. After that, any big edits break the deal. It turns into a digital picture that started on film. The whole point here is showing what the film and camera actually captured.
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palmer.ryan13d ago
Right. @keithward nailed it. That whole translation idea is bigger than just scanning though. Its the same thing with cooking for me. You take good ingredients and you prep them right but if you start dumping a bunch of random sauces and spices on top you lose what the actual meal was supposed to be. People want the pure version not a remix. Same with recording music too. You capture the performance and the room sound but then some guys add so much reverb and compression it doesnt sound like a band playing live anymore. We do this everywhere. We take something real and then we cant help but try to improve it until its something else entirely. But the best stuff always has that honest core where you can tell it was preserved not polished.
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Honestly I used to tweak my scans a lot too, but that blog post about it just being a translation really hit me. Now I get why keeping it pure matters.
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