I scanned recently some old negatives and worked on them in Ps.
I have the impression that those old things have lots of "body", of "substance", that I don't get with my digital camera
Of course I am inexperienced and maybe imagining things just because I don't master the techniques.
Any opinions?
Actually, you are probably right, which means that if you are, then so am I.
I feel very happy with what I can do in Photoshop, all the little tricks that turn nothing into a little bit of something, then I look at a simple print, heads of my two young kids together, that sits, framed, on the bedside table - a quick shot made on the end of a roll at the end of a commercial shoot, just before I unloaded the Hasselblad and took the stuff into the darkroom. A 10"x12" on double weight Kodak, grade 2, and even today, maybe forty-five years later, that print looks fabulous to me, the tonality - the feel of those tones, and it reduces my opinion about my digital stuff to crap. And no tricks out of a computer programmme; how dated! But how lovely. Hard to beat a good glaze!
Yes, film is different, and that shot was on Kodak's TXP 120, no fine-grain wonder, but overflowing with character on that format. Oddly, I never used it for 135 format; didn't like the look it gave on those smaller negatives.
Film had something best described as organic, which does not mean that I could look at images on the Internet and always know which was which, digital or film, just that for me, it worked beautifully, satisfied my eye, and that's what counted.