I sent twelve rolls of Kodachrome off to Dwayne's for processing. Much of the returned film is badly scratched, mostly horizontal scratches running length-wise along the film, with other scratches thrown in for good measure. Infrared cleaning in the scanning process is troublesome with Kodachrome and often does more damage than it cures.
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One form of photography that I enjoy is city street shooting at night. When I upgraded back to film, I feared that this kind of shooting would remain digital: digital has certain advantages for high-ISO shooting. As it turns out, my fears were unfounded; I quite like the look I'm getting with film.
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Working out a method for scanning color negative film with VueScan, minus all the unwanted adjustments.
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Mini-labs are no longer a great option for film processing. But C-41 processing is easy. If you are already processing black-and-white film, you can do C-41. It's only slightly harder, and doesn't require any equipment you don't already have.
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Kodachrome is famous for, among other things, being tricky to scan well. I've been scanning quite a lot of Kodachrome, shot during recent travels, so I figured I'd share what I've learned.
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There's a great article over at The Online Photographer today about exposure. Anyone interested in photography ought to read it. It's how we learned it back in the day, but reading it provided a refresher I didn't even realize I needed. If you ever wondered how people managed to get their exposures right without obsessively checking the histogram and re-shooting, well, this is it.
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Something that works well along with the Kodachrome-like color profile I posted previously is warming up the shadows a bit, a simple trick to get those rich shadows you yearn for. In Lightroom, you can warm up your shadows without affecting the rest of the image using the Split Toning tool. Set the Balance to 85, Hue to 40 (a warm yellow), and Saturation to around 23; adjust to taste. That's all there is to it, but it's surprisingly useful. To make it even easier, I've packaged this as a Lightroom Preset for you, which you can download here.
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If you were a film photographer who has switched to digital, one thing you miss is Kodachrome. Digital cameras have given us images that are superior to film by most objective technical measures, but they haven't yet made a digital sensor that looks as good as Kodachrome did 60 years ago. Kodachrome is as good a reason as any to pick up the old film camera, but sometimes you want to get closer to that look with digital. I did, too, and Adobe's free DNG Profile Editor can help. With the Profile Editor, you can create camera profiles to be...
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