OVERVIEW

Photographs have long held a significant place in our ability to recollect historic moments, whether the scale of those moments encompass a greater society, or, more intimately, a record of family legacy, the ability to convey a range of emotions, and a broader context from a single image has allowed us to maintain a visible comprehensive understanding of our own past.

Today, our contemporary use of photographs has evolved with the technological advancements leading a fully connected, content driven society - we use photos as a means to help curate our own indentities through sharing moments as they happen, and with cloud technology, these moments are often immediately backed up and preserved in a digital realm for posterity.

As this content forward society is a relatively new paradigm, there is in excess of a century of historic moments yet to be made accessible, as they remain in their original prints or negatives.

Image Formats

Conceptually, a photograph is universally understood as a momento of time, a single instance captured within the bounds of a frame - but capacable of holding a context beyond that. Today, we're capturing images, in the highest volume, on our mobile devices, which produce the resulting image instantaneously. In eras prior, however, photographs were more commonly produced via a variety of unique film formats, with specific dimensions, and sometimes for different viewing methods (prints, slides, x-rays).

post-processing

Color and Contrast Correction

Colour and Contrast Correction is provided by shifting the existing colour information in your photograph to counter fading and photo degredation that can occur, causing the image to look awash in red or green. This can happen from sunlight or UV exposure which can breakdown the molecules that comprise are comprised in the dyes and pigments used to produce colour.

In more severe cases, images that suffer from this sort of colour change can appear to lose definition due to the loss of colour contrast between the existing image details. When possible, re-introducing blues and greens, and reducing some of the red presence in an image can boost the perceived clarity of a photograph, returning it as close to 'true' as possible.

Noise Reduction

There are a number of variables that can result in the presence of noise in a photograph. This film texture can arise from using a film format incompatible with the specific setting of photos taken, such as using indoor film outside, or a result from a camera issue.

Noise reduction lessens the prevalence of this trait, but eliminating it entirely can make a photogrpah look soft and unnatural. Even in contemporary digital imaging there is a practice of adding noise which, in some cases, lends a perception of increased sharpness in a relatively organic way.

Manual Spot Removal

Spot Removal, in a mainstream sense, is often discussed in the context of portraits, where editors aim to manipulate a subject's appearance to meet an ideal end result. The spot removal in our editing process is strictly aimed at eliminating any dust, scanner issues, or prevalent, simple scratches that may be obstructing primary subjets in an image.

For a more comprehensive image manipulation/reconstruction, we offer a tailored Custom Editing Service which can be provided to specification.

approximate output resolution
1200 DPI 1700 x 1130 px
2400 DPI 3400 x 2270 px
3600 DPI 5100 x 3400 px

35mm Slides

Kodachrome's introduction of a new colour process made way for the mass adoption of 35mm slides, as any prior methods to capture, and subsequently produce, colour images demanded a more complex approach, requiring the use of glass plates, and due to the need for long-exposure shots, an inherit limitation on the types of photos that could be captured in colour.

approximate output resolution
1200 DPI 1320 x 1320 px
2400 DPI 2650 x 2650 px
3600 DPI 3970 x 3970 px

126 Slides

Providing for a larger resulting image from the 35mm, Kodak released the 126 format, branded as Instamatic, in the 60s. The novel concept, at the time, would see the film housed in a plastic cartridge that could be quickly, and easily loaded into cameras for an added level of convenience for consumers.

approximate output reoslution
1200 DPI 2400 x 2400 px
2400 DPI 4800 x 4800 px
3600 DPI 7200 x 7200 px

127 Super Slides

The 127 Super Slide is a roll type film with a width of 46mm, making it larger than the newer 35mm, but smaller than the 120 Medium Format film. This film format was popular from the early 1900s through the 50s until the introduction of, more convenient, cartridge based options.

approximate output resolution
3600 DPI 1560 x 1130 px

110 Slides

Considered a less common slide format, the 110 is easily identifiable by the small 13mm x 17mm images produced. Introduced, perhaps, as an economy option for hobbyist photographers, the cameras that used 110 film were of a poor quality, and made cheaply to provide an inexpensive market price.

approximate output resolution
1200 DPI *Family & Archival Grade resolution 1700 x 1130 px
2400 DPI 3400 x 2270 px
3600 DPI 5100 x 3400 px

35mm Negatives

The introduction of 35mm film made it vastly more accesible to be an active photographer. Before the arrival of the 35mm camera, a would be photographer required heavy plate cameras which were heavy, and cumbersome to carry around.

The added accesibility of the 35mm camera allowed for a greater exploration of photo-journalism and street photogrpahy with it's ease of use.

Today, this film format has seen a resurgence among professional photographers.

approximate output resolution
1200 DPI 1430 x 790 px
2400 DPI 2855 x 7580 px
3600 DPI 4280 x 2370 px
*.

APS Negatives

Providing for approximately 56% of the area of a 35mm negative, the APS format is a consumer grade format, uniquely identifiable post-process, as they're returned to consumers in the same cannister sent in for development. Due to the reduced size of the film, against the 35mm format, APS negatives are generally critizised for producing less clear images.

approximate output resolution
1200 DPI 2835 x 2835 px
2400 DPI 5670 x 5670 px
3600 DPI 8500 x 8500 px
*.

Medium Format

The preferred format for professional photographers shooting fashion, wedding, or portraits, Medium Format negatives generally refer to any size up to 4x5".

The size advantage over the 35mm allowed for a greater density of detail to be captured without much loss in the accesibility of use.

approximate output resolution
1200 DPI 1280 x 789 px
2400 DPI 1280 x 789 px
3600 DPI 1280 x 789 px
*.

Other Negatives

Between the most common formats, there is a whole range of short lived, novelty, or specialized (custom) negatives that exist for, at times, industry specific purposes. An example of this are medical X-Ray transparencies (of any size), which upon process, require the utmost attention to the most minute of detail.

approximate runtime information
3600 DPI 1560 x 1135 px
*Due to the very small size of the photo frame on the disc film, we only scan the image at 3600DPI to achieve a large enough image.

Disc Film

A film format that outlived the production of its cameras, the Kodak Disc Film was a consumer format that uniquely sat on circular disc cartridge, that could be easily loaded and removed from the camera. Proving to be a novelty niche product, Disc Film cameras ceased production in the late 80s, while the film format, itself, was still available for nearly another decade, ending its run in 1997.

A unique trait of this format was how thin it was - it allowed for the production of very thin cameras made extremely compact for carrying. The flat nature of the disc film also meant a possibility for sharper images over the traditional spool-load cameras, which had an inherit curve.

approximate runtime information
600 DPI 1280 X 789 PX

Printed Photos

Traditionally, printed photos are the end result of an entirely involved, manual development process. However, as digital cameras became the new consumer and industry standard for photography, we can now print a digital file directly to a printer and produce comparable results (depending on the printer and file quality).

While these are a great physical artifacts, the downside is a printed photo contains no more than 300 DPI (dots per inch) worth of information. This doesn't suggest you're missing detail from your print. It only means that, should you wish to scan and reproduce the image, you could not print anything larger than its current size without substantial quality loss in 'blowing up' the image. In order to reproduce the image in a larger format, while maintaining the source quality, you would need to scan directly from the original negatives, which can be scanned for in excess of 3000 DPI worth of informaiton.

approximate runtime information
600 DPI 1280 X 789 PX

Large Format Photos

Large Format refers to any print in excess of typical consumer-sized prints (ie. 8x10). Things like large documents, maps, or posters often fall into this category. These larger images require specialized scanning in order to accomodate for dimensions that exceed standard production flat bed scanners. Depending on the studio, this can be achieved by using a high end camera, with very specific lens and lighting settings, or digital 'stitching' - a process wherein the image is scanned in sections. The individual scans are seamlessly comped together to produce a single, true-to-size digital image.