I’ve noted (or at least hinted) that one thing that I am scanning is film negatives. Why scan film negatives?
Again, I reiterate, because this is important!
Film negatives have the following advantages over prints:
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Film negatives are the original image captured from the camera. Therefore, they have undergone a minimum number of processing steps, resulting in the greatest avaiable photographic quality.
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Film negatives generally have a higher resolution and more detail than the prints, although later generation prints near the end of the film era approach the spatial resolution of the original film negative.
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Film negatives have more stops of high dynamic range than prints. Generally speaking, a print has no high dynamic range within it. High dynamic range is useful for reprocessing underexposed images, which generally cannot be done on a print.
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Film negatives are not set up on display like prints are, but rather stored in the dark. Therefore, fading will be minimized and film negatives will have better preservation compared to the prints.
Now, I add some information based off of my own experience.
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For prints, the gamma and exposure range can be impoperly set compared to the original negative image. This is especially common occurrence from cheap photo developers. This causes many prints to have an unnatural look to them, compared to a quality processed photo from the film negative.
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Often times, the print is cropped down from the original negative image, which can result in the print missing some key details.
Finally, last question. Which film is better, negative film or reversal film?
For a modern digital workflow, negative film is the best because it has the most stops of dynamic range. However, back in the heyday of analog photography, reversal film was considered the best for color photographs as the film processing technology wasn’t otherwise sophisticated enough to create a good image with additional processing steps. For digital, projector or print doesn’t matter, you can create good quality either way.
Some of the links from which this information originally came from, though I can’t find them all.
20170702/https://petapixel.com/2012/05/18/how-to-scan-film-negatives-with-a-dslr/ 20170826/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_film