E-6 to C-41: A Transition

[Drew Wiley]

HENRY - insects etc see certain things in UV or infrared which we can't see; similarly
there are certain hues we can see that one film or another can't. I've run into mineral
colors in the desert and fluorescent algae out along the coast that no film can seem
to record (although the old style side-by-side grainy Agfachrome sometimes worked, or
a tricolor b&w white system might work). If trannie films are relatively limited in scale,
color negs films have distinct limitations in hue gamut. If you're able to reproduce those missing colors in PS then you are inventing them and not duplicating the results
of the film per se. Maybe dithering like heck. More likely, you're just used to a particular film and have learned to see the world the way it does, which is not realistic. Doesn't mean the results aren't potentially pleasing, but it's a myth that any
kind of film begins to capture light or color as we really see it. And it's all really a game of illusionism, making our media look convincing when its actually artificial. I've
spent my whole adult life trying to get certain rare hues to reproduce in print, and I don't think I'll ever succeed. Neg films just make it harder; and PS is limited by the
output media. Inkjet certainly has its gamut limitations; and Lightjet etc is just std
C paper. My last resort is dye transfer, which is not perfect either, but a more
accurate gamut than anything else I'm aware of. It's a bit of a revelation when these
things are put side by side.

[Henry Ambrose]

Drew,

Read Ben's post again -- "if you're scanning" -- is the part that guided my further comments. Your darkroom experience is impressive but it does not apply to "if you're scanning".

I've spent a large part of my life transferring color digital images to paper and showing others how to do the same. It used to be hard and fairly complicated but today its a well known and fully developed technology. I can say with certainty that scanned color negative film can be rendered to give a wide variety of looks including the look of color positive film. Its up to the user to decide what they want, then learning how to get it.

I looked at your site - I bet your prints are impressive in person.

[Drew Wiley]

Thanks for the compliment, Henry, but I think my website stinks, and there are very
few images on it printed less than twenty years ago. Low priority. But it illustrates what I said, getting used to a particular medium, in my case, the idiosyncrasies of
Cibachrome and how to deal with it. Negs and PS offer different options (I also do
color neg optically printed, for its own pallette). But nothing can be called "universal".
Makes me very jealous of what real painters can do with watercolor etc. I love the
complex neutral gray-greens and dusty gold and earthtones we get in our California
summers, and haven't found any kind of photographic output that will match them.
Anybody can take a box of Crayolas and work with saturated colors; it's the neutrals
which test the system - and color neg film still dumps certain things toward skintone.
I'm working with masking corrections, both with Type C and dye transfer printing, which is a tactile option to what PS does. Ironically, got my best neutrals with Ciiba,
but that was due to years of experience bludgeoning it with masks and formula tweaks. Can't do much with DT till I formally retire from my day job, and then have
just so long till the supplies run out. Can't do it all. Have to pick and choose your
battles. I wonder what the old-school Vericolor guys think, after they've formed entire
bodies of work around palletes which are now discontinued, with color neg film "improved" for guys like me.

[rguinter]

I suspect that the "problem" here is that the subject brightness range (SBR) of your scene is limited, down around 4-5 stops. This makes it a "better match" to tranny films in general -- IOW, the tranny will be more contrasty and "rich" while the negative will look somewhat flat and "pale" in comparison. This is because you are using most of what the tranny can do, but a much smaller portion of what the negative can do.

A secondary problem may originate in the fact that negatives are more color accurate than trannies. This according to a retired Kodak engineer who worked on such things (he's PE on APUG). That's what the orange mask is all about -- improving the color accuracy. But just because it's more accurate doesn't mean that you'll like it better. Really -- there's often a difference between what's accurate and what looks good.

Either or both of these things can easily be "cured" in a scanning and photoshop workflow. Considerably more difficult IMHO if darkroom printing.

If you really like what E-6 gives you, it might just be worth finding a lab and mail ordering your processing. But if you are scanning, C-4 can do what you want if you're willing to climb the learning curves in photoshop. But really, you should do what works for you.

Bruce:

Some very good points. To-date I have avoided doing much of anything with Photoshop other than tidying up and removing a few dust specs. I've always liked to work with exactly what I can get (in-camera) with E-6 films and the great variety of filters I've collected over the years.

I have worked with all the adjustments that can be done with the scanner software and I do agree that the C-41 negatives can be made to look nice. But they are so much different than the slides that that was the reason for starting this thread.

The lab I use does farm-out the E6 that I've been doing and the lab they use has been giving me some good results. But I miss having the control over where the film is going and when. I may just have to live without that control and start mailing my own to one of the bigger labs.

I think your comments about SBR are probably right-on regarding sunset/evening photos.

The Ektar 100 and Portra films do look beautiful during the day and are becoming favorites so I've stocked up on both.

Bob G.

[rguinter]

... I love the complex neutral gray-greens and dusty gold and earthtones we get in our California summers, and haven't found any kind of photographic output that will match them...

I think Drew is right.

I'm not debating others' comments above that scanning negatives can make the output look like chromes. But so far for me it hasn't and I've tinkered with all the controls.

This sequence just back from the lab and scanned yesterday. Film was Ektar 100 4x5-inch and cropped a bit at the bottom to remove irrelevent foreground.

All are nice sunset photos but totally different from what I would expect with E-6 scanned with default settings.

Bob G.

[Ben Syverson]

All are nice sunset photos but totally different from what I would expect with E-6 scanned with default settings.

It's the phrase "default settings" that I have a problem with. Like anything worth doing in life, scanning requires a little care and attention. Think about wet printing. If you slap a negative in an enlarger with "default filtration," and develop the paper with "default times," you really can't draw any conclusions about the film itself. You're looking at one narrow, lowest-common-denominator interpretation of the negative.

Obviously no one does that; if you're spending the time to make a wet print, you carefully adjust your process to produce the best image. Exposing the negative in the first place requires your care and attention. Why should scanning be any different?

I just don't buy the argument that "E6 gets me the image I want and I don't have to mess with the software." If that's the workflow you want, do what Ken Rockwell does—shoot JPEGs on a DSLR with saturation set to +10.

Decisions about how to render your image are going to be made by someone or something. I believe it should be you. That decision-maker could be the technician scanning your film, your DSLR's image processing chip, Photoshop's "Auto Levels," your scanner's default settings, pure chance, or you. I believe photographers should not absolve themselves from making those critical decisions.

Attached is a fairly raw scan from Ektar 100, followed by an "E6 version" made in Photoshop. This is my best approximation of what I get with E6—deep blacks, punchy highlights, and a slight overemphasis in the blues (makes skies look great). The saturation has not been adjusted. If grabby color is what you want, it's quite easy to achieve.

[Drew Wiley]

I'm just getting started with Ektar and haven't done any sunset work except over at
the Hana coast in Maui (yeah, a real hardship!) - generally very pleased, but of course
not the same saturation level as a chrome film. The question is the blues. The turquoise blues of those tropical waters responded wonderfully to Ektar; but I have a
serious question how deep true blues will do. Eager to get fiddling with this film but
have a lot going on right now. Still fiddling with formal Macbeath chart test and
contact sheets of various formats, plus masking protocols, especially versus the performance of Portra films. What I just mentioned about neutrals, however - I can
take a high-quality set of watercolor pigments and reproduce difficult hues in moments
that become a nightmare photographically. PS lets you eyedropper and "mix" or dither
too, but with nowhere near as much ease and precision. Maybe in my old age I'll end
up where I began, painting watercolors. Every medium has its limitations. Just about
the worst gamut I've ever seen was with color Fresson and the old alizarin crimson
and chromium oxides pigments it used - but it would print gold buttons that looked
like metallic gold instead of yellow! Even the dye transfer prints which Eggleston made of Elvis' gold piano look yellow not gold. Limitation is the name of the game.

[Bob McCarthy]

My issue has always been, "I" cant see through the orange mask and reversed colors on a light table.

I completely agree that scanning and PS editing can come very close to replicating most any film.

So does anyone make a color reversal film w/o the mask. Isn't the mask about printing directly on paper.

a)or is it better to remove the mask with an evedropper to grey and then reverse

b)or is it better to do a reversal and they remove mask.

I would love Ektar to be my film of choice, but its always a challenge to convert them to a positive. I use method a) but get results all over the map, sometimes great, sometimes a challenge.

some help?

bob

[Drew Wiley]

Ben gives an excellent example of tweaking the curve of Ektar on PS to simulate chrome film. But that doesn't solve the excess cyan which drifts into certain neutrals,
not as bad as old-time color neg films, but still there, and not in fact as neutral as what a chrome film has. The orange mask does in fact affect the gamut and is not
simply related to contrast control. It has to if you think about it, and it effects cannot be totally nulled out. Looking at a color neg on a lightbox is a totally different subject -I'm just used to it, so no big deal. Or you could buy one of those old Kodak video analyzers, but if you scan anyway, just have your monitor adjusted to see positive.
The other thing I find disappointing is the generally poor punch in the blacks of digital
color output in general, at least in the color versions of it. Even Fuji Supergloss is dull
compared to Ciba or DT. But in DT you can separate the emulsion layers separately
and mask for each to correct the final printing dyes, for example, the cyan issue, and reassemble (a lot of work, because interpostives have to be made even before the separation negatives.) This could hypothetically also be done by scanning RGB individually and PS correcting each film dye this way rather than overall. Maybe some of you advanced PS technicians already do it this way.

[Ben Syverson]

some help?

Once you invert the negative (so that the image is no longer a negative), it's usually a three part process for me. First, adjust the black levels in Red, Green and Blue, one at a time so that black is neutral (doesn't need to be pure black, just neutral). Second, adjust the white points in Red, Green and Blue so that the image is in the right ballpark in terms of color, without clipping any channel. Third, introduce some curves in the RGB channel to restore contrast, and do simple curves in the color channels to get your final color.

It takes longer to type it out than to do it.