I went all over the place this summer and shot a bunch of film, including half a dozen rolls of black and white film. At the moment, I don't have supplies to process my own film, let alone an enlarger to print, so I had the film processed commercially and scanned. Then I took the scans, picked a couple and had them printed at a Kodak kiosk. Unsurprisingly they don't look like real gelatin silver prints.
The biggest difference is in the grain. I shot two rolls of Tri-X which has a unique grain structure and renders some tones with a distinctive "salt and pepper" look. In real prints, this shows up, but it's blurred or completely lost in the digitals. I'm guessing it's both the fault of the scanning and the printing processes. The negatives weren't scanned at super-hi res, and they're stored in jpeg. Printing seems to exacerbate this, especially on a cheap. |
