Digital to film

[John Leekley]

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So……..is there a method for transferring digital images to film?  I know, it’s usually the other way around but, you know, digits are ephemeral; it won’t take much to make them all disappear forever. Yes, you can make prints and try to preserve them but I think it would be much more efficient to transfer to film and store the film. Any thoughts?

[adan]

2 hours ago, John Leekley said:

....is there a method for transferring digital images to film?

Several.

But the main problem is that they almost always require an enlarged copy, because digital output resolutions are usually nowhere near as high - per inch/cm - as a digital camera can capture. To record every detail that, say, a 60-Mpixel M11 can capture, requires output measured in feet or meters, not 24x36mm.

For example, the M11 captures ~6328 pixels per inch. Most digital imagers only output around 240-400 pixels per inch - a resolution reduction of 1/20th the camera's capabilites - so output needs to be 20x as large (a 20"x30" output, on either film or paper).

And therefore not really an improvement over a straight paper print.

However.

- Make inkjet prints of a digital image onto transparent material, such as

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/598567-REG/Pictorico_PICT35028_Pro_Ultra_Premium_OHP.html/?ap=y&ap=y&smp=y&smp=y&lsft=BI%3A514&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIn5CIvr-wgQMV1jetBh189wVpEAQYAiABEgJ7RPD_BwE

Instant enlarged negative (if you invert the image tones before printing). I know several people who do this, to then make alternative- or vintage-process contact prints (silver darkroom prints, platinum prints, cyanotypes, carbon prints, etc.)

- In the dawn of the digital era, there were smaller output versions ("filmwriters"), "written" with laser beams onto 35mm roll film fed through an imaging box. Just about enough resolution for "slide shows" in the pre-Powerpoint era. They also lost resolution in the transfer process. Most are now defunct.

- along similar lines, De Vere (Brighton, UK) makes a darkroom enlarger that will print onto traditional photographic materials from a digital image displayed on an LCD panel, placed where the negative would be in a traditional darkroom enlarger.

It can reproduce a digital image - resampled to 17 Mpixels maximum (about M9/Monochrom Mk. I resolution) - at any size you can adjust the height and focus for.

In theory down to a 24x36 piece of film - but that will end up being extremely dependent on the quality of the enlarger lens, in the macro range. Prints onto intermediate-sized film (4x5" to 8x10") are probably a better bet, for archiving.

http://de-vere.com/products-504ds-digital-enlarger/

.....

I would note that most professional archives (e.g. U.S. Library of Congress, British Museum) have gone to digital archiving for a simple reason.

It is considered more archival and safe than a single film original or copy - because any number of "perfect" digital duplicates (every single 1 and 0 bit copied exactly, and errorchecked) can be saved across multiple archives. One (or more) perfect copy in your house, one in your bank safety-deposit box, one at work, one on "the Cloud," and so on.

Just migrate those files to new digital storage every few years, and in formats with longevity and universality (.TIF, .jpg).

I would also note that most pigment inkjet output has been tested**, and has an archival life of 100-200 years. At least as good as most analog film or paper, processed archivally. So far as we know - photography itself is not 200 years old, yet.  

Either, of course, will need proper storage (controlled temperature and humidity, in places immune to atmospheric pollutants and/or UV light), for longest life.

** this is one site directed at testing and reporting archival life/permanence of digital prints: http://wilhelm-research.com

 

[Anbaric]

We used to use a desktop film recorder back in the days before digital projectors - we'd prepare a presentation using some (pre-Powerpoint) graphics package, then output it to slide film with this gadget. At that time Polaroid sold a range of 'instant' 35mm slide films that could be rapidly developed in their proprietary mini-processor, which was a natural fit for this application. Instead of bringing a laptop or a USB stick, people would turn up to conferences with boxes of slides that would be transferred to Kodak Carousel slide projectors by the meeting organisers.

I don't know if anyone still makes later model film recorders like this or these (the high-end Arrilaser models are or were made for the movie industry), but there are certainly still services that will put digital images on anything from 35mm slides to large format negatives, e.g.:

https://www.digitalslides.co.uk/

https://www.slidesfromdigital.com/

 

Edited September 17, 2023 by Anbaric

[John Leekley]

Thank you, Adan, for the very detailed reply. So the bottom line answer for us Jo Sixpack photographers is “no”: better to spend your money on multiple backups strategically spread out and maintain them. 
Thanks again. 

[adan]

Just make sure to label the devices carefully as to contents, on the outside.

In 50-100 years, no one will be able to tell, from the outside,  if any particular "hard" or SSD drive contains photographs that might be interesting - or just someone's boring and outdated financial records.  

[Pyrogallol]

In 50 or 100 years time the plastic will have disintegrated and no one will have a machine to read them on. With film you only have to shine light through them to see the pictures.

[dpitt]

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17 minutes ago, Pyrogallol said:

In 50 or 100 years time the plastic will have disintegrated and no one will have a machine to read them on. With film you only have to shine light through them to see the pictures.

+1 That is my fear.

Copying the digital archive from one disk to another as technology progresses provides somewhat more longevity. Choose a basic format like JPEG or TIFF for your archive. These will probably be readable long in the future but there is no guarantee it will make sense to a computer 50 years from now. Online storage has the advantage that this is done for you.

Chances are that the AI computer will be so advanced that it can look through archives old enough, or is intelligent enough, to figure out any format you throw at it. Any of our images will look primitive in a way we can not even imagine now. No one could dream in the year 2000 that one image could be 60MP and 16 bit color debt out of a 'consumer camera' and a multiple of that on a professional studio camera. My Powerbook (macbook pro back then) had 64MB of RAM and 6 GB of HDD.

So it would be able to store 40 RAW files from a M11 camera now, and it would run out of RAM before it could open one in full resolution. These files are 50x larger than the files from my Digilux 2 in 2004. We could not imagine a laptop with 8.000GB (8TB) of HDD (1.000x.more, and SSD speed was not imaginable) and 96GB of RAM (1.500x more) that we can order now from the Apple store. And that is barely 25 years of evolution...

So imagine these 60MP files 50 years from now... They will be primitive and look tiny on the hardware that will be available.

[250swb]

It will be pretty poor if programmes in 100 years can’t read older technology, how will historians work, how will any researchers be able to work given everything is being transferred to digital. This argument is like monks who went blind transcribing the scriptures onto parchment arguing against the Gutenberg Bible.

Edited September 17, 2023 by 250swb

[pop]

1 hour ago, 250swb said:

It will be pretty poor if programmes in 100 years can’t read older technology,

Modern archives do not try to anticipate which media and which file formats might still be readable in the near or far future. Rather, they document the formats being used now and they have procedures in place for copying and converting old material to new media and formats.

This does not, of course, include much of the material by private individuals. However, I'm not overly concerned about whether my own private images may or may not be readable two centuries from now.

[250swb]

16 minutes ago, pop said:

 

However, I'm not overly concerned about whether my own private images may or may not be readable two centuries from now.

It takes strength to give up.

[williamj]

On 9/18/2023 at 5:44 AM, 250swb said:

It will be pretty poor if programmes in 100 years can’t read older technology, how will historians work, how will any researchers be able to work given everything is being transferred to digital. This argument is like monks who went blind transcribing the scriptures onto parchment arguing against the Gutenberg Bible.

Sadly, it didn't take 100 years for this to happen.  If you've got documents from say ClarisWorks stored on a floppy disk from say 1991 I wish you good luck in trying to open this file let alone read it on a modern computer. If you can find an old computer still running the software, well and good, but computers that old running old versions of software aren't common. I used ClarisWorks as an example because many people have used this software. We faced a problem where all our sequencing traces could no longer be read when the manufacturer switched from Mac to PC. We could output the text of the sequence while the old computers were still around but if we needed to go back to look at the old traces that was not possible even though the PC software had the same name as the Mac software.

That's why I have the opinion that if one's digital photos are not printed one can't be certain they will be available in the long term. Apple has already substituted JPGs with HEICs which masquerade as JPGs when transferred, but for how long. Sorry, it's one of my soap boxes. Cheers.

[Anbaric]

On 9/25/2023 at 8:26 AM, williamj said:

Sadly, it didn't take 100 years for this to happen.  If you've got documents from say ClarisWorks stored on a floppy disk from say 1991 I wish you good luck in trying to open this file let alone read it on a modern computer. If you can find an old computer still running the software, well and good, but computers that old running old versions of software aren't common. I used ClarisWorks as an example because many people have used this software. We faced a problem where all our sequencing traces could no longer be read when the manufacturer switched from Mac to PC. We could output the text of the sequence while the old computers were still around but if we needed to go back to look at the old traces that was not possible even though the PC software had the same name as the Mac software.

That's why I have the opinion that if one's digital photos are not printed one can't be certain they will be available in the long term. Apple has already substituted JPGs with HEICs which masquerade as JPGs when transferred, but for how long. Sorry, it's one of my soap boxes. Cheers.

I think there's a difference between proprietary file formats that were only ever readable by one package, and widely supported formats that are universally supported. The tiff and jpeg standards are published and well-understood, and any image viewer or editor (including many tools you can get the source code for) can handle them. I don't think they'll become unreadable in the forseeable future. I think the same applies to raw files at a basic level, which are supported by Open Source code like LibRaw and dcraw, though it may be more difficult to process them optimally in the future - the camera profiling data is generally not accessible in proprietary packages like the camera manufacturers' own sofware or major raw developers like C1 or LR, which tend to have the best profiles, and you may not have access to the camera itself to generate your own profiles. Incidentally, if you mean DNA sequence traces, I've not had any problems accessing files from our old (ABI) instruments using third party Linux or Windows tools like Chromas, Staden or UGENE, and there is even an R package (sangerseqR) for this stuff; the file formats are well-documented. The big problem is dead media - if I had, say, a Mac format Zip disk with these files on it I'd be screwed! That's why anything important needs to be actively curated and transferred to the latest storage medium as required.

[Martin B]

As Adan already correctly mentioned, this is the process named "Digital Negative". Lots of information online when you search for this term. I have practiced this process several times to allow me to make silver gelatin prints from digital IR or B&W files. In case darkroom prints are made with digital negatives, the inkjet printer has to be calibrated to the enlarger plus silver gelatin paper tonality which is not as simple as it looks. But once done, you are pretty much set to make wonderful prints which are IMO the same as from analog negatives. Few things to be aware of with digital negtaives:

+ Always print the digital negative in larger format size. For best results, I choose 4x5" large format size for my digital negatives. It might work also with medium format 6x6 or 6x7 cm, but I haven't tried this so far. Going from digital full-frame to equal 24x36 mm negative size is too much loss in quality/resolution.  

+ I would not recommend this process to make hardcopies of digital photo files. It is quite time-consuming to get this right. The paper to print on - especially with larger digital negative size - is not cheap either. You are better off getting external hard drives as backup for digital files. 

 

 

[Martin B]

On 9/17/2023 at 2:32 PM, adan said:

Just make sure to label the devices carefully as to contents, on the outside.

In 50-100 years, no one will be able to tell, from the outside,  if any particular "hard" or SSD drive contains photographs that might be interesting - or just someone's boring and outdated financial records.  

I suspect that less than 10% of recorded digital files from today (and which are not any special archive material) will survive even 50 years. I have several friends who took all their baby photos with cellphones and kept them on the cloud. Many of them lost these images throughout a span of less than 5 years. Valuable family moments disappeared - which were also never printed. I believe before even graphic format standards change, cloud services with payment and subscription options will change so fast that this will become the main reason for loss of taken digital photos. Photos secured on external hard drives might also get lost easily when e. g. people pass away and whoever inherits the drives is likely not interested to go through them to keep. Most will be simply discarded/trashed. Same as negatives - they won't be kept when a household is dissolved. Best chances for photos to survive longer than someone's lifetime is with framed prints and photo books/zines. Even this is not a guarantee either. 

[01af]

Am 17.9.2023 um 01:01 schrieb John Leekley:

... but I think it would be much more efficient to transfer to film and store the film.

No.

[adan]

On 9/25/2023 at 1:26 AM, williamj said:

Sadly, it didn't take 100 years for this to happen.  If you've got documents from say ClarisWorks stored on a floppy disk from say 1991 I wish you good luck in trying to open this file let alone read it on a modern computer.

Yes - but ClarisWorks was a proprietary Apple format. ".CWK"

For archival purposes, as I mentioned, they needed to be saved in a universal format (.txt or .rtf for words, .xls or .ods for spreadsheets, .xml or .json for data bases, .jpg or .tif for images).

It is quite possible that "raw" images in proprietary manufacturers' formats (.IMG, .NEF, .RW2) will require specialized translators to read in the future. As might Adobe's .DNG and .PSD formats, if Adobe ever vanishes. I would avoid those for archive copies, and "simplify" images to be preserved to .jpg or .tif.

And of course, migrate important files to new devices as storage formats and device-connection formats change.

I can still read files originally saved on floppy disks with a SCSI drive in 1988 - because I moved them again and again to hard drives with USB/USB-C/Firewire/Lightning connections, as those became the norm.

 

[pop]

1 hour ago, Martin B said:

Photos secured on external hard drives might also get lost easily when e. g. people pass away and whoever inherits the drives is likely not interested to go through them to keep.

If not even the heirs are interested, I don't think it's much of an issue.

[pop]

17 minutes ago, adan said:

Adobe's .DNG and .PSD formats, if Adobe ever vanishes. I would avoid those for archive copies, and "simplify" images to be preserved to .jpg or .tif.

DNG is an acknowledged standard and widely published. Besides, it's a variant of the TIFF format.

[adan]

32 minutes ago, pop said:

DNG is an acknowledged standard and widely published. Besides, it's a variant of the TIFF format.

You may have more faith in the longevity of tech companies than I do.  

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Hallo,

Look here: Interesting Leica gear

[willeica]

Sometimes to look forward we have look backwards. For what it's worth, I'm doing some work on a collection which is between 130 and 100 years old. It mainly consists of glass dry plates, both negative and positive. Some are cracked and some have the emulsion lifting, but, generally, they are in good shape, by comparison with the film negatives (from c1910 onwards) in the collection which are somewhat crinkled at this stage. Everything in the collection has also been digitally scanned and backed up. To my mind, the really valuable things are the original glass plates and negatives, but the backup is also critical to preserve what is on those plates and negatives.  There are also some original prints around. All of these need to be preserved through a number of parallel processes. There is more to be preserved, however, as we have the photographer's notebooks from between 1890 and 1920 recording what he did with the images which he took and these have now been scanned as well. To top it all off, we also have the preserved darkroom, containing cameras and lenses and other equipment, which was used between 1890 and 1922 and that too needs to be maintained. I'm doing a research Zoom on next Sunday, 1st October, at 10am UK/Irish time for the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain (PCCGB) and anyone who wants the link to it should send me a PM. This whole project has brought home to me the great importance of preservation and not relying on a single track. The original artefacts are as important as the images themselves. 

Back in the 19th Century, very few people took photographs and the amount of material to be preserved is relatively small compared to the amount of photographic material that was produced in the 20th Century. Now we are in the digital 21st Century the volume has increased to such an extent that managing this has become as important a task as preserving it. Selection and curation are really important in this context. We have to face up the fact that not everything that was created is worth preserving and choices have to be made. In another role I am Chairperson of a photo museum and we have created a National Collection of contemporary photographers. One of those photographers who is a Leica user and whose work we have preserved has had about 30,000 negatives of his scanned. However, talking to one of our  team last week, he estimated that the photographer might have created between 500,000 and 1 million negatives during his lifetime. We are involving the photographer in this selection process, but the real issue is the size of the task which is probably repeated many times around the world for photographers and institutions. 

Finally, looking at Andy's post above, it is clear that preservation is only a start and that ongoing maintenance is critical, whether the collections are physical or digital. I'm only just skimming the surface on this as there many other issues involved such as rights management and inheritance etc,

William