What's the real color of negatives?!

[Daniel Moore]

The halls still reverberate from my spanking newness regarding scanning best practices, however, I have spent countless hours learning color management - colorspaces, gamuts, profiles, the whole crazy bag of digital demands. I can say now that C F Systems ColorPerfect for negative scans has been the fastest and most satisfying route I've tried. You'll go cross-eyed reading the yeas and nays on the program and it's earlier incarnations colorneg/negpos, but a trial version is available and I suggest you use it to see i you can help quickly come to terms with negative film scanning. It's a daunting interface, I'll admit, but I find I only use a couple settings to arrive at the desired output. Most importantly, I find I arrive at the most attractive color right out of the gate and have saved a ton of tweaking and second guessing.

[Ben Syverson]

Daniel is right to put the emphasis on attractive color vs "accurate" color.

100% color accuracy is a holy grail that only fools chase, and you know what they say about fools and their money...

[Robert Jonathan]

There are a lot of reasons to use negative films over tranny films.

Can you tell me those reasons? (I'm serious. Not trying to be a smartass).

I'm still a bit new to LF (shooting for a few years), but the reason I ask is because I've been only shooting Provia 100F and E100G, not only because I can show off my results easier (and I like the films sharpness and color), but because it seemed for a few years, everyone who shot film and printed digitally were shooting chromes, not negs.

Also, whenever I see a scan of negative film compared to chrome film, the negs are grainy and littered with color noise (which I can remove easily, I know), while chromes are smooth and clean, and usually sharper with more detail.

So why do I now see people gobbling up Ektar and Portra, compared to what I've seen in the past years, where people were just shooting chromes? Or have I been incorrectly judging the types of films people have been shooting?

[Ben Syverson]

In the past, chromes were favored because they were sharper and less grainy than negatives.

Over the past 5-10 years, negative film has caught up. Ektar's incredibly fine grain can go head-to-head with the best chromes these days.

Negative films are much nicer to work with, because of their incredibly long response curve. Highlights that would be blown out to pure base (no information) on reversal still have plenty of information in a negative. There's just so much more latitude.

Have you ever tried to shoot slide film under mixed lighting? It can be a real pain to filter it correctly. By contrast, negative film can be far more effectively color corrected in printing/scanning.

Those are a couple important reasons.

[Tyler Boley]

My memory is that chromes were favored for commercial work as they were separated or scanned more readily than neg, which would require printing then reflective scanning. We also proofed on polaroid to make sure our lighting ratios would fit on chromes. Sometimes hi end fashion work was done on negs then printed and scanned, if a softer look was desired. But for fine art I believe negs have always dominated, particularly in large format- Stephen Shore, Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, countless others... of course there are exceptions.
Tyler

[Bruce Watson]

Can you tell me those reasons?

You can search this forum for a bit and find out lots, and get many more opinions beyond just mine. But for what it's worth...

The biggie for me is much bigger dynamic range. You can shoot negative film in direct light while still maintaining visual detail in both shadows and highlights. I've captured 11 stops or more without any artifacts (such as color shifting) that I can find.

Another biggie is color accuracy. Of course, the films are color balanced for a specific set of conditions (typically some version of "daylight", but daylight varies like crazy outside the studio) so for absolute color accuracy you'll have to be in the studio or be really lucky in the field. So perhaps I should say relative color accuracy (maintaining the relationships between colors). Some people I should note find this to be bad. And at that point you get into the "accurate" vs. "looks good" argument. I'm not going there.

Negative films tend to have lower density ranges than trannies which makes them somewhat easier to scan. They also tend to be less saturated which also makes them easier to scan.

From a technical standpoint (and there's not much reason to care about this in LF and bigger, but you did ask), modern color negative films are actually a bit sharper, and a bit finer grained than their tranny cousins. Note I said "modern" because this has not always been the case.

Before you scream about graininess, let me just say that trannies often look less grainy. This is because graininess follows density. And the dense parts of a tranny are the shadows, where the graininess is harder to see, while in a negative it's in the highlights were it's easy to see. But the RMS graininess ratings show that with similar ISO films, negative film is a bit less grainy these days.

That said, I've got a few really large prints from 5x4 160Portra (one generation back from the current version). Printed on a smooth canvas to 150 x 93 cm. Big honking print. It looks grainless to me, and hundreds of people have seen it now and made comments without a single negative comment about graininess, one way or the other. But many asked about the sharpness. And I'm a minimalist when it comes to Photoshop -- no denoise program, minimal capture sharpening only. I could do more but it begins to look unnatural to me so I don't.

That's my list off the top of my head. But none of this may matter to you. And that's OK too. Film choice is just another tool after all.