----- Original Message -----
From: "Toralf Lund"
Subject: Re: Why I Haven't Yet Switched
I must say that when I express a certain scepticism to digital photography
now and then, it's partly because of all the talk about the "workflow" on
this list and elsewhere, which gives me the impression that although you
also read a lot about how "simple" digital is, it has actually introduced
extra work that *has to be done*...
In the "old days", most of the workflow was handled by the film
manufacturer, paper manufacturer, and the person processing and printing the
film.
Some people took on extra work flow by having their own darkrooms.
Digital has introduced several more layers of processing options, and allows
a lot of things to be done easily that are difficult to impossible to
emulate in an film based optical printing environment.
One doesn't have to take advantage of this control, most of my digital
customers are running their cameras on the manufacturers default settings,
with many just dump their files in my lap, hoping I can salvage something
for them to look at.
Also, I've never thought a lot about "colour balance" with film, but
perhaps that's because the lab has done the job for me? I wonder if there
are many labs that will accept "raw" files and do something productive
with them these days, by the way. Most of the "consumer" ones I've come
across seem to know of no other file format than JPEG, if you know what I
mean...
With digital, the photographer has become the photo lab, to a great extent.
If you don't intervene at all, and just hand over autogenerated jpegs that
the camera has spat out, you are handing over a processed file that has
limited potential for alteration.
The user can control pretty much every step of the process, from exposure to
final print if they want to. The enthusiasts that tend to habituate camera
mailing lists such as this tend to be biased towards this sort of control.
William Robb
