Color fillm negatives developing for highlights

[Steven Ruttenberg]

I have been using a grad nd on my skys and exposing to zone v for the darkest shadows. How would I go about doing that? BW as the 2 bath and other techniques, but what does color neg/slide film have?

[jp]

Use Portra 160, expose for the shadows, develop normal. Scan and be amazed.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

I did use Portra 160 14 frames at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon this weekend. Sunset was a bust, sunrise was so, so, the Aspens were golden, red, green, orange. Windy as hell most of the time. I have 6 frames of Extar 100 that are of Aspens, 2 of the Canyon with excellent clouds, but it was around 2 in the afternoon though. I am prepared to be amazed.

Funny thing is that I took my Canon 5DMKIII, set it to f/8.0 (used f/32 for 4x5 with 75mm Nikkor f/4.5) spot metered the same shadow, used the the same 3 stop grad nd, took image and according to the histogram and jpg, the sky was totally blown out. If I used the camera avg metering, the sky was not blown out, but the shadows were really dark. However, the histogram is based on the jpg review image and not the raw image so there may very well be detail in the highlights. But this is one area I believe film still blows away digital. Digital only knows 1's and 0's and only when a bucket is full of a certain amount of a photon (very linear process) film is linear for the most part, but that heal and tow on the curve at the highlights and darks if I am reading the curves right shows how film can handle highlights better than digital. It shows a natural compression of the highlights and darks where film just continues straight.

Anyway, film is where it is at. Until sensors behave in an analogue fashion, with a randomness to the pixel layout frame to frame, just like film, can do away with the bayer filter, not need anti-alising, I am not inclined to upgrade my MKIII nor give up film anytime in the distant future. The worst is that digital, has only 50% true green, 25% true blue and red. Ie, in order to get100% red, green and blue, the software must interpolate the information to fill in the missing red, green and blue information. Film does not need to do that. Plus, to smooth the image so no moire pattern which is based on the nyquist frequency of the pixel spacing it needs to be aliased (slight blurring of image) if this is not done, get better sharpness, but greater risk of moire. Film does not have this issue to my knowledge. Although, a sensor without the bayer filter (bw) and no anti-aliasing filter gives good results, but still not as good as film, but it works much better than the color versions.

I digress, :)

[koraks]

You can pull color negative films, but with a loss of saturation and also a substantial loss of acutance, I find. I not sure I'd recommend it. Films like portra already have huge latitude that helps to preserve highlights. If your output is digital, then just develop normally and like someone else said, be amazed. For ra4 printing, you could try pre- or post flashing.

[Bruce Watson]

I have been using a grad nd on my skys and exposing to zone v for the darkest shadows. How would I go about doing that? BW as the 2 bath and other techniques, but what does color neg/slide film have?

C-41 process has been rigidly defined. Part of the reason for this is the number of layers in modern color negative films. Time and temperature have to be rigidly defined to ensure that the chemistry fully penetrates the layer stack as designed.

Mess with temperature and/or time at your peril. Deviations almost always cause visual artifacts, included some interesting color crossover issues that can't be corrected in darkroom printing, and some that are very difficult to impossible to correct even with scanning and photoshop work.

Your best bet is to expose for the shadows and let the highlights fall where they may. Not what you wanted to hear, but that doesn't mean it's not the truth. Ask Kodak, if there's anyone left there to ask. Used to be a toll free number for Kodak Professional; I'm still showing 800.242.2424 x19, but I have no idea if that number is still active or not.

Alternatively, you could search APUG, or whatever it calls itself now. APUG used to have some retired Kodak engineers who were very generous with their time and explanations of how the various chemistry/film interfaces actually work. It's all in their archives.

[Bob Salomon]

C-41 process has been rigidly defined. Part of the reason for this is the number of layers in modern color negative films. Time and temperature have to be rigidly defined to ensure that the chemistry fully penetrates the layer stack as designed.

Mess with temperature and/or time at your peril. Deviations almost always cause visual artifacts, included some interesting color crossover issues that can't be corrected in darkroom printing, and some that are very difficult to impossible to correct even with scanning and photoshop work.

Your best bet is to expose for the shadows and let the highlights fall where they may. Not what you wanted to hear, but that doesn't mean it's not the truth. Ask Kodak, if there's anyone left there to ask. Used to be a toll free number for Kodak Professional; I'm still showing 800.242.2424 x19, but I have no idea if that number is still active or not.

Alternatively, you could search APUG, or whatever it calls itself now. APUG used to have some retired Kodak engineers who were very generous with their time and explanations of how the various chemistry/film interfaces actually work. It's all in their archives.

Way back in the day, around 74, or so, I sold Hope processors in NJ through Simplex Speciality. One day I received a call from Bruce Cashman in Las Vegas who said that they had the franchise for Resorts Casino in AC and he needed a lab for the shots the camera girls took at shows and restaurants. He asked me to meet him in AC and we would discuss what he needed.
So I drove to AC where he had me comped for a room and we met for dinner. He even arranged a dinner companion for each of us!

What he wanted was a Hope C41 processor that could process C41 at a very high temperature and in very short time and the same thing for the print processor as the film that the girls shot had to have prints delivered in well under an hour, before the customers left the show room or the restaurant.

His offer was that we supply modified processors to the lab in Reorts at no charge and, IF, this worked we would get a contract to supply the same machines to his labs in the casinos in LV and Reno plus all his other labs that would be in AC as more casinos would be built.

We refused the deal and thanked him for the room and the dinner.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

Way back in the day, around 74, or so, I sold Hope processors in NJ through Simplex Speciality. One day I received a call from Bruce Cashman in Las Vegas who said that they had the franchise for Resorts Casino in AC and he needed a lab for the shots the camera girls took at shows and restaurants. He asked me to meet him in AC and we would discuss what he needed.
So I drove to AC where he had me comped for a room and we met for dinner. He even arranged a dinner companion for each of us!

What he wanted was a Hope C41 processor that could process C41 at a very high temperature and in very short time and the same thing for the print processor as the film that the girls shot had to have prints delivered in well under an hour, before the customers left the show room or the restaurant.

His offer was that we supply modified processors to the lab in Reorts at no charge and, IF, this worked we would get a contract to supply the same machines to his labs in the casinos in LV and Reno plus all his other labs that would be in AC as more casinos would be built.

We refused the deal and thanked him for the room and the dinner.

My thoughts exactly!

[interneg]

I have been using a grad nd on my skys and exposing to zone v for the darkest shadows. How would I go about doing that? BW as the 2 bath and other techniques, but what does color neg/slide film have?

No need. Key to the shadows and let the highlights go where they will - truly burning them out is a major challenge. If you darkroom print, there's plenty of control at the printing end (as koraks has pointed out) & if you need more, you'll need to learn register masking of various sorts. Scanning on a high end machine (CCD/ PMT) will give plenty of options too. Applying the expansion & contraction aspects of the zone system (by adjusting process time) to colour neg will not work.

[chassis]

Exposing color negative film with the darkest shadows on zone 5, at 2pm in the afternoon, leads to overexposed highlights to my thinking. There is some flexibility with C-41 development, but not alot. I have developed good quality (density, contrast, saturation, grain) C-41 negatives with times ranging from 3:00 to 3:45, with Kodak prescribed time of 3:15.

For a landscape, I spot meter shadows and highlights, and set exposure for the middle of these ranges. I also take an incident reading, if the camera position is in the same light as the subject. The incident reading should be somewhere close to the middle of shadow and highlights. Judgment based on experience needs to be applied in choosing the exposure. The overall brightness range needs to be within the film's capability (something around 10 stops for C-41).

[Steven Ruttenberg]

Exposing color negative film with the darkest shadows on zone 5, at 2pm in the afternoon, leads to overexposed highlights to my thinking. There is some flexibility with C-41 development, but not alot. I have developed good quality (density, contrast, saturation, grain) C-41 negatives with times ranging from 3:00 to 3:45, with Kodak prescribed time of 3:15.

For a landscape, I spot meter shadows and highlights, and set exposure for the middle of these ranges. I also take an incident reading, if the camera position is in the same light as the subject. The incident reading should be somewhere close to the middle of shadow and highlights. Judgment based on experience needs to be applied in choosing the exposure. The overall brightness range needs to be within the film's capability (something around 10 stops for C-41).

I agree. I have shot a lot at mid-day, but at sunrise and sunset it is worse. If you expose for the shadows the highlights go bye-bye. I use a grad nd to help pull those back in.

[jp]

My experience with Portra (and tmax 400) developed normally and for scanning is that if you expose for good shadows and have extreme dynamic range in the scene, the highlights will be on the film no problem and perhaps your scanner or scanner software might be challenged by how dense the brightest highlight areas scan.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

That is true. But I do try to get my highlights to be within a couple stops of the darks (zone V) This seems to give me latitude for adjustments, especially in PS/LR. But sometimes I don't make it and I am still 5 or 6 stops over. I want to get the shadow detail correct, and not go to far over on the highlights, but if i do, I want to be able to recover them without them looking all whacked out.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

I tried this concept with digital the other day and it works out well. Following the same methodology as film, I exposed for the shadows, used a 3 stop grad nd filter and the result was good shadow detail and the skys looked blown out big time, but they weren't the histogram was misleading as well as the "blinkies" When I processed it (equivalent to developing a sheet of film) the highlights are pulled into place very well. This is what I want to do with film. Although, I would work on not having the sky quite so bright. Progbably needed about 8 stops to avoid this and maybe a slight faster exposure, but I was wanting to avoid any straight black areas in the image. Not 4x5 and posted only as example of where I am going with this thought process. If needed I could delete the images/reply.

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1930/31227233378_62d3450730_h.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/PzrJxu)_BD15999_Orig (https://flic.kr/p/PzrJxu) by Steven Ruttenberg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/157376714@N08/), on Flickr

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1978/43287085430_62b3773e82_h.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/28X8Cp9)_BD15999 (https://flic.kr/p/28X8Cp9) by Steven Ruttenberg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/157376714@N08/), on Flickr

[cdavis324]

When you're trying to compress the range of exposure with color neg film, overexposure is your friend. Like multiple stops! Because the highlights are contained within the shoulder of the curve all you have to do is bring up the level of the shadows. Don't mess with developing - unless its + a little to add a touch of contrast.

The zone system was developed for traditional b/w, and not t grain films, so difficult to apply to color neg work. With portra or ektar, just overexpose, and if you're worried about too much contrast, expose a few more stops! Fuji is a bit more temperament, so 3-4 stops overexposed max.. Unless you like the silver look.



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[Steven Ruttenberg]

Good discussion. I have a lot to try!