Re: prints contrast question

[Bruce Rubenstein]

Figure 5 stops for the paper used for consumer machine prints. If you 
are in high contrast situations you need low contrast film. There is no 
such thing as an all purpose film. There are ways of dealing with high 
contrast negatives, without digital, but beyond using low contrast paper 
they aren't all that simple or cheap. Digital isn't all that simple or 
cheap if you're paying someone to do it either.

BR

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

does anyone know, how much contrast can color paper (specifically fuji
crystal archive) handle?
the reason i am asking is that i just came back from a vataction and got
back a batch of prints. which do suck by any definition of it: no shadow
detail, blown out highlights. true, the original light was pretty harsh,
still i was very upset. until i looked at a bach of slides i took under the
same conditions. which were nothing like the prints!
now i am scanning the print film, i notice that often i cannot get the whole
dynamic range with a single pass (nikonscan 4000), i have to scan once for
shadows and once for highlights. but altogether it looks like the film
captures most of the dynamic range of the scene.
my question is: what's the point of so wide lattitude of print film, if it
cannot be printed anyway (in pre-scanner era)? or, is it just a particularly
bad kind of paper i ran into?
best,
mishka