Digital vs. Analog in Print

Today the FedEx driver delivered my copies of the new Whitman College viewbook, for which I took the bulk of the photographs. It is an instructive document, as it neatly spans my transition from film to digital. When I shot the campus in the fall, I did so on color negative film. The spring shoot was with my 8.2 mp Canon 20D. It was my first major assignment in digital.

Boy, do the digital shots look better.

Even on the uncoated stock on which the document is printed (which can cover up a multitude of sins), the difference is obvious. The film (when enlarged to 9x12) is grainy, problematic with highlight detail (even though the client scanned from the negatives), and is mushy overall. The digital is crisp, even, plenty of shadow information (such as the paper stock allows) and nice, detail-filled highlights. Even one shot of students on a lawn, midday, harsh sun, worked out. I couldn’t have captured it on film. Digital raw capture had enough latitude to handle it.

Call me a convert. The next assignment, for the University of Chicago, will be on the Mark II. The file quality at higher ISOs is awesome, and will allow even more flexibility.

Comments

[Christian]

I'd be willing to bet that part of quality difference came from you doing the post processing on the digital stuff instead of someone else.
We all let the color separator do the work when it was slides, but now that it's digital we can get the image we want (and hope the press holds to it). Now surely digital alone explains some quality difference, but I also think if you had scanned and adjusted all the film work you would also see some boost in quality.
Christian

[Doug Plummer]

Well, that would be ideal, wouldn't it. There are budgets, and post-production work by me wasn't in it. I did get to tweak some of the full page digital shots, but otherwise all the digital shots were printed from the jpgs(!)I submitted to the client. Which still looked great, surprisingly.

[David Adam Edelstein]

Really interesting to hear that the difference was that strong. Not entirely surprising, I suppose -- we've all been seeing how digital has no grain at all and so forth. But the midday sun shot surprises me. Now I'm more sure about wanting to upgrade my 10d to a 5d when those come out.

[Bruce Nall]

I have had similar experiences. I provided both scanned film files and digital capture files for a recent book project. I have had several more years of experience doing pre-press on scanned film files so I know the scanned files were good. The files from digitally captured images I provided reproduced much better. Comparing the two, I was disappointed in the film images even though I have been happy with how the files reproduced in the past. The digitally captured images were much, much better.