Ektar vs New Porta 160

[Drew Wiley]

Good advice, Brian. I spent a lot of time and money last year actually printing Ektar
vs Portra. Mostly 8x10 film to 20X24 optically enlarged CAII prints, but also some smaller film sizes. Learned quite a few things the hard way about the differences. But
one thing which is probably applicable to all our respective individual workflows is to
test, test more, and then optimize the exposure to our specific needs. 8X10 color is just too expensive to be winging it. Ektar is a little more forgiving than typical chrome
film, but nowhere near as forgiving as Portra.

[Brian K]

Good advice, Brian. I spent a lot of time and money last year actually printing Ektar
vs Portra. Mostly 8x10 film to 20X24 optically enlarged CAII prints, but also some smaller film sizes. Learned quite a few things the hard way about the differences. But
one thing which is probably applicable to all our respective individual workflows is to
test, test more, and then optimize the exposure to our specific needs. 8X10 color is just too expensive to be winging it. Ektar is a little more forgiving than typical chrome
film, but nowhere near as forgiving as Portra.

Drew, testing is the only way to nail one's process. There are far too many variables in all of our set ups to have a "one size fits all" POV. Even down to our shutters, their apertures and speeds all vary, our meters vary, our thermometers vary, etc.

Portra is the film I recommend because it's nearly as good as Ektar when it comes to grain, I find it's actually higher resolving, and it has such incredible exposure latitude. It's very forgiving. And let's be honest here, if accurate color was the requirement then chrome film is the no brainer choice. As you pointed out, there's a lot of post exposure color reinterpretation that goes with color neg film. Which is why professionals always shot chrome.

I always find "which film is better" threads funny. The question should be, "what are the characteristics of this film and what is the best situation for it's use?" And then you carry as many films as raesonable to do what you need to do. Compromising on using a film in a situation that it is not best suited for already puts you in a hole.

[Drew Wiley]

Well I do tend to way more draconian in testing than most folks because I have very
specific hue rendition needs, and in this case, I don't want the traditional neg look.
Every medium has its idiosyncrasies, but Ektar can be coaxed into more of that chrome
look than other color neg materials. No silver bullet, but it looks like the best thing
so far. Takes a lot of post-processing work - in my case, advanced masking skills;
but PS could obviously be used too. I got a running start on this whole project as
insurance for the inevitable demise of Cibachrome (itself highly idiosyncratic).

[polyglot]

PolyGlot, the scanner that the OP talked about is an Imacon, not a Nikon. You mention that by using RGB gain you are able to pull more detail out of a dense negative, but at the cost of a 10 minute scan taking an hour. Is there any practical advantage in having a scan take 6 times longer? There are downsides to that. Wouldn't you be better off if you didn't have to?

Anyway all I did was offer from my, and those of other professional's experience, that we find a slightly under neg easier to scan and yielding a better result. The proof is in the pudding. I don't think that anyone looking at the tonal ranges I achieve in my work is going to think that my process is flawed in that area. But to each their own.

The point is that overly broad statements like "scanners cannot vary exposure time" are incorrect and misleading; they lead to suboptimal decisions in other parts of the work flow like deliberate underexposure. where such might not be called for by the artist's vision.

Obviously a 1-hour scan is somewhat undesirable... except that it produces a result possible only by extending exposure time (or cranking up the light intensity), i.e. analogous to printing-through the thick neg.

While I have never operated a drum scanner, I'd be a little surprised if you couldn't integrate the results over multiple revolutions to get more gain. An inability to scan even slightly-thick negs sounds like a severe drawback for what should be professional-grade equipment. If 1/3 of a stop is the difference between clipping highlights or not, the system is seriously fragile!

[Ben Syverson]

I certainly agree. If your scanner can't handle Ektar or Portra's Dmax, which is below 3.0, what on Earth would you do with a color slide, where all the shadow detail is above 3.0?

I fully trust that Brian K knows his stuff and is working based on years of experience and testing, but I respectfully urge caution when it comes to the dangerous practice of underexposing negatives.

I often rate negative film a full stop or more below box speed, because I know the highlights are trivial to capture and recover, and I've come to enjoy shadow detail. The argument against this is that you're pushing highlight details into the shoulder, making them noisier/grainier when they're recovered. But one or two stops is not enough to see much noise, and besides, we're talking about LF here. We have tonality to spare.

[Brian K]

The point is that overly broad statements like "scanners cannot vary exposure time" are incorrect and misleading; they lead to suboptimal decisions in other parts of the work flow like deliberate underexposure. where such might not be called for by the artist's vision.

Obviously a 1-hour scan is somewhat undesirable... except that it produces a result possible only by extending exposure time (or cranking up the light intensity), i.e. analogous to printing-through the thick neg.

While I have never operated a drum scanner, I'd be a little surprised if you couldn't integrate the results over multiple revolutions to get more gain. An inability to scan even slightly-thick negs sounds like a severe drawback for what should be professional-grade equipment. If 1/3 of a stop is the difference between clipping highlights or not, the system is seriously fragile!

Polyglot, I guess you're right about scanners, I was far too broad. But then again I never produce a neg so poorly exposed that it requires 6 times longer to scan to burn through the density. As my film is always properly exposed and I have very little experience dealing with poorly exposed negatives. If your film requires such a major correction then maybe you're not as dialed in as you think you are.

As for the 1/3 of a stop being a slight change, it's not because the system is "fragile" it's that a 1/3 of a stop underexposure will not deteriorate image quality in any noticeable manner, while giving you a hair less grain and a slightly better negative for the purpose of scanning.

Ben, I'm willing to bet if all of the film produced by LFF members were analyzed you'd find that most are not "perfectly" exposed, or that the speed they rate their films at and what their labs actually deliver is not accurate either. Most people don't do densitometry, most people do not test all their emulsions or continuously send comparative film tests to different labs (when shooting color). And that's one reason why there are people with poorly exposed negatives.

And Ben, when you're talking about "pushing highlight details into the shoulder" surely you're not talking about Ektar or Portra because they don't have a shoulder according to Kodak's characteristics curves. They have a toe, but they are pretty much a straight line all the way after that, no shoulder. But you also talk about often intentionally overexposing a full stop, are you suggesting that people overexpose by a full stop???? But my underexposing by a 1/3 is "dangerous"?

Why don't we just leave at the fact that we have calibrated our methods and materials and we have found processes that optimize our particular situations. But to others your mileage may vary so test for yourself.

[Ben Syverson]

Brian, 1/3 stop is almost too minor to detect, but the dangerous part is when human error or stop rounding creeps in, and all of a sudden it becomes 1/2 - 1 full stop.

The "danger" of underexposing is that you can lose shadow detail you meant to preserve. There is no danger in overexposing by a full stop, because you won't lose information. You'll just get a little extra density.

All negative films have a shoulder. It's not on the charts, because it's slightly beyond the normal range of exposure. You can see this by taking a photo that includes the sun. If the density curve was purely "straight", then the sun would go darker than Velvia black on the negative. Obviously that's not the case.

In any event, I agree that YMMV, and people should test more!

[polyglot]

Polyglot, I guess you're right about scanners, I was far too broad. But then again I never produce a neg so poorly exposed that it requires 6 times longer to scan to burn through the density. As my film is always properly exposed and I have very little experience dealing with poorly exposed negatives. If your film requires such a major correction then maybe you're not as dialed in as you think you are.

For a normal negative, absolutely your exposure times shouldn't vary much at all. The one requiring crazy long print/scan times was bleach-bypass, i.e. it contains most of the silver and is therefore far denser even than the D-max achievable with normally-bleached C41.

I don't do densitometry and sometimes I get my exposures (badly!) wrong but 99% of my exposures are good enough for chromes. I find myself varying scanner exposure by about half a stop roll-to-roll and that's all down to difference in base density from different brands of film. I tend to shoot often in pretty contrasty light though, so I might be more paranoid about shadow detail than is the norm

[federico9001]

Portra is certainly easier to scan, more natural, more balanced.

But Ektar can be a cheaper option sometimes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/castors...n/photostream/

[paulMD]

Personally I think Ektar starts to get strange color casts easily, particularly with overexposure. The colors increase in saturation quite a lot and tend to take on a few characteristic shades. Reds all become fire-engine red. Yellows all become lemon yellow. Blues all turn cyan. Earth tones just seem to increase in saturation across the board. Thus, I view it as having a relatively narrow exposure latitude, I'm not really surprised to hear you shouldn't underexpose it either.

At least, that's been my experience scanning it with Epson's software. Lately I've been messing around with a trial of Vuescan. It seems to be able to keep color balance a lot more consistent than Epson because of the option to lock the film base color. Epson tries to re-interpret the colors every time and I doubt that helps matters.