So would I, and I'd never return to a landline or a dumb mobile phone.

As a kid, I remember asking my parents what people did BTP — before toilet paper. My kids once asked me what we did BISP — before Internet and smartphones.

I assume you're using the latest version of Lightroom Classic and not the old Lightroom 6.14 or earlier, or the new Lightroom (cloud-centric version). I also assume you're using Photoshop 2024. If so, here are some things to check:

Did you check Lightroom Classic's Preferences —> External Editing Settings? That will need to be configured properly, so you can use Command + E (Mac) or Control + E (Windows) to send a file to Photoshop.

Recommended Settings for sending files back and forth from LrC to Ps / Ps to LrC are:

Photoshop Version: 2024
File Format: TIFF
Color Space: ProPhoto RGB
Bit Depth: 16 bits/component
Resolution: 240 or higher (lab junkies like me use 240; brainwashed masses use 300; delusional folks go higher)
Compression: Zip

Also, be sure you have enough available memory to open Photoshop while Lightroom Classic is open. If you have less than 16GB installed memory on a Mac or 24GB installed memory on a Windows machine, and you typically keep a lot of applications open, shut them all down and re-boot before doing a session of editing. Giving both the applications and the System room to "breathe" will speed up everything.

At home, I used Honeywell Nikor stainless steel tanks with Nikor reels, in a big plastic tub "water jacket" that tempered my tank and chemical bottles. I got very consistent results with all processes, but after doing C-41 twice, I decided, as you did, that it was more practical and economical to just have a lab do C-41.

My personal color work was mostly Kodachrome 64, sent to Kodak in Atlanta. I souped a few rolls of E-6 at home, but it didn't save me any money, due to low volume. B&W was ALWAYS best done at home, as I souped over a thousand rolls through the years.

I don't use new film now, but if I did, I'd do my own B&W and take color film to a trustworthy custom lab. I continue to copy film digitally with my macro lens and camera.

C-41 is standardized. If you:

> Use fresh chemistry
> Use clean equipment
> Maintain the recommended temperature constraints (usually 100.4°F ± 0.5°F)
> Follow recommended agitation and timing
> Wash the film properly
> Use stabilizer as recommended

…Then the film will be fine.

Optical printing variables included:

> Film brand, film type, film generation, film emulsion number
> Film processing variations (see above)
> Enlarger lamp or printer lamp age (output gets warmer as the lamp ages)
> Paper brand, paper type, paper generation, paper emulsion number
> Dichroic filter gearing slop in the enlarger head or printer lamp house
> Paper processor control (chemical activity, pH, temperature, time, agitation...)

Using Lightroom Classic with Negative Lab Pro makes the process easier than working in a pro color lab with an expensive video color negative analyzer. I don't mind digitizing film at all in 2024. The tools are so much better than they were in the optical lab days!

You will need good chemical temperature control, good ventilation, chemical-proof gloves,* and eye protection for ANY C-41 or E-6 process.

C-41 in any form is nasty. At the lab where I worked, we used several thousand gallons of C-41 every Fall until 2007, when we ripped out the film processors. The chem mix lab was off limits to everyone except the chem mix supervisor, who wore a hazmat suit and a NIOSH approved respirator when mixing that stuff. Both our film processing employees died of liver cancer shortly after we shut down the film processing area. They were notorious for ignoring PPE when the power went off and they took it upon themselves to be heroes and clear a stalled ciné processor to rescue what little film they could.

*I ran 15-20 rolls of Ektachrome through an E-6 sink line about once a week for five years. I had contact dermatitis from the latex gloves I wore, and didn't realize it wasn't from the chemistry until some years later, when I was diagnosed with a serious latex allergy. But still, I got a serious headache from the fumes in that darkroom every time, despite a ventilation hood over the sink line.

Burma Shave ads were iconic bits of Americana.

Traveling in the '60s was always an adventure. If the cheesy Valiant didn't break down at least once, Dad would take a wrong turn when Mom was asleep, and we would go 90 miles in the wrong direction before he noticed. She was the navigator, with the map in her lap.

Resurrecting dead threads by commenting on them is not recommended. If it has been more than a month since a thread was active, then chances are, the issue in the topic has been resolved, the dead horse has been flogged at least once, and the carcass sent to the glue factory.

This thread is over THREE YEARS OLD. I'm certain that the original poster has long since made a decision and moved on.

Kindly refrain from using the term, "mirrorless DSLR," referred to in the title. There is no such thing as an SLR or dSLR without a mirror. There would be no "Reflex" without a mirror.

The intended term is Digital MILC. MILC stands for mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. (Film MILCs (for example, the Leica M6) are known as rangefinder cameras).

Look for YouTube reviews of it. I remember watching a couple of them.

I have over 100 CDs I burned from 2000 to 2017. I haven't had any of them fail. They were all burned in an Apple Superdrive, on name brand CD–R blanks. Most are stored in paper sleeves at room temperature.

That said, I'm under no illusion they will last 100 years, or that they will be readable on available systems then. I do believe that SOMEONE will have systems to read archives made on media from the past.

That said, when I'm dead and gone, I won't care. I seriously doubt my kids will care, either.

I do still have thousands of negatives from the 1960s through 2005, most of which are printable or scannable in some way. The B&W ones are going to last another 50 years or more, if kept the way I've kept them. The color negs will fade, albeit far more slowly than the original sets of prints made with them.

Is there value in slowing down? Yes. Digital technology has been approached far too often with a "Ready? FIRE!!! Uh, aim? WTF is 'aim'? mentality."

But is using film a solution? If you think it is, then it is for you.

I used film for 45 years. It worked fine. It was all we had. But because I navigated various career opportunities to running the digital side of a very large school portrait lab around 2000, I found parallel replacements to EVERY aspect of film photography I thought I might miss or need.

I was lucky to have the professional learning opportunities of Kodak Professional seminars, Digital Imaging Marketing Association seminars, and Photo Marketing Association International seminars from 1995 to 2010. The film world shrank as the digital world exploded, for all the right reasons. The perspective I gained in the lab and from training photographers to use digital capture instead of film capture has been very gratifying.

I still work with OLD film, by copying it to digital files. But I'll probably never see the inside of a darkroom again. I have zero interest in what, for me, is drudgery.

On the other hand, all the knowledge I gained from decades of film use transferred to digital photography just fine. I get what I want with much finer control, and more quickly, than with film. The advantages of digital bits over chemical atoms for practical imaging applications are far more numerous. The biggest one is that if you have a print, you can show it off in one place at a time, but if you digitize that image, it can be "everywhere all at once," with very little effort. And if you understand the nuances of digital printing, you can make excellent prints on a myriad of papers and other substrates.

If you value slowing down, deliberating, controlling, and thinking about what you're doing, you can train yourself to ignore all or some of the automation that you find on your digital camera. Spend more time planning, lighting, and composing the scenes you're photographing. All the same basic controls are there, just as they were half a century ago. They're just easier to use.

Good one! (on both counts)

Yep. Most advanced editing software has that feature.