Nice bright colors...

[terrie]

It's a sad day...no more Kodachrome ...

"An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo [Parsons, Kansas], a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved." [New York Times 12/29/10]

Terrie

[Steve Rindsberg]

Mama don't ... mama don't .... awwwww, mama, PLEASE don't ....

Aw nuts.

[terrie]

steve: Aw nuts.

My sentiments exactly...

Terrie

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hmm. I wonder ... if I got back all the money I spent on K-64 and processing the last, say, four years I used it regularly, would I have enough to buy a digital camera capable of anything approaching equal image quality? Is there even such a thing? Somehow that feels like a silly question.

[terrie]

steve: Somehow that feels like a silly question.

LOL!!! I don't think it's all that silly...'-}}

Terrie

[Steve Rindsberg]

Originally Posted by terrie

LOL!!! I don't think it's all that silly...'-}}

Terrie

Silly or not, it sent me off on a quest to find some sort of reasonable comparison between digital and the effective equivalent number of pixels for, say, Kodachrome. I found a few sources quoting "around 12,000,000 pixels" as the approximate film equivalent. This is bull exhaust of a particularly low grade. When I used to be a film recorder jockey, we ran most of our images out at 4096x2732, 11.2 million pixels or so, and the result was nowhere *near* what Kodachrome would resolve. Nor was it close when we doubled the resolution in each direction (44 million pix or so).

Really, the amount of utter nonsense out there is amazing.

[terrie]

steve: Really, the amount of utter nonsense out there is amazing.

LOL!!! And...you are just discovering this? '-}}

Terrie

[Steve Rindsberg]

Originally Posted by terrie

LOL!!! And...you are just discovering this? '-}}

Terrie

<g> I suppose so. I never really went looking for specifics because it was so obvious that nothing digital even came close to what Kodachrome could deliver.

So many opinions. So few brains.

[terrie]

steve: So many opinions. So few brains.

Indeed! It's amazing how much crap there is out there...'-}}

Terrie

[John Spragens]

I'm quite fond of my own Kodachrome slides.

And when I was scanning several hundred old family slides last year, it was obvious how much better Kodachrome was at holding its color, compared to various other chromes.

But there's an unkind problem when you move the film images into the digital world.

With Ektachromes and Agfachromes and Fujichromes and others, you can minimize the need to clean up the inevitable dust by using Digital ICE when you scan.

Not with Kodachrome.

You know how if you turn a Kodachrome slide over and look carefully at the emulsion side, it looks rather like an etching? The darker parts of the emulsion are physically thicker, dramatically so. And Digital ICE reacts badly to that, creating nasty edge artifacts. So you have a choice: Use Digital ICE and live with the artifacts (sometimes not terrible if you're just turning out low-rez images for email or Web). Or turn it off and put in the extra time for dust spotting by hand.

Fortunately, Photoshop's spot healing brush gets better with each new version.