Sunday, June 12, 2011

Polaroid Digital Conversions And Thoughts On Digital Editing

One of the things that I love about film is that by picking the right type of film, camera and processing you can get results "right out of the camera" that would take a lot of work to recreate in Photoshop. However, this feature of film gets a little fetishized on a lot of the analog photo blogs that I follow. For some, "straight scans" are the holy grail, including some where only unadjusted scans of wet-printed photographs are legit, and everything else is somehow "cheating."

My view is a lot more flexible. Even my "straight" scans usually include adjustments for color, contrast and some sharpening to adjust for the the loss of sharpness you get when you scan any image. I also like playing with my images, sometimes engaging in some heavy (perhaps even heavy-handed) digital processing. Really nothing I do isn't something that someone highly proficient in a wet darkroom couldn't reproduce, but since I have no desire to become a wet-darkroom guru (and certainly no time), I'll stick with my digital toys.

Below are a couple examples of some heavy-editing experiments that I did awhile back, using scans of some paper Polaroid 100 packfilm shots, which I had scanned with my regular flatbed scanner. K hates them, but I like the effect. I wouldn't want to use the effect on every photo I took, but I think it works for these.

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