Resolution Comparison Between Films?

[ClickCL]

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has a resource or personal opinion on the resolution differences between films? I have very little experience with LF but have a decent amount of experience shooting other formats up to LF.

I have noticed that generally E-6 films seem to have an edge over C-41 films, but with that said, there are so many variables it's hard to confirm if what I am seeing is reality. I would be very interested to see a side by side test done or hear some of your experiences. Also, where do you think silver gelatin stands against the two. Obviously we would be comparing like film speeds and more specifically the fine grain, slower films.

I have a project I'm preparing for and I'm trying to determine which film I want to work with. I can only imagine, if film resolution is noticeable on my smaller formats, then on the scale of an 8x10 it would make a significant difference, no? Thank you in advanced for your help.


EDIT: I realize now, I should have posted this in the Darkroom: Film, Processing & Printing category. If there is a way to move or delete this thread, that would be great. Thanks

No problem, thread moved. --Oren

[interneg]

C-41 films outperform E-6 on the metrics that matter - sharpness, latitude, granularity etc - and if your display medium is anything other than the original transparency, these factors matter very strongly indeed.

[ClickCL]

Interesting! I was well aware that C-41 has a greater latitude but I did not expect granularity or sharpness to be a strength over e-6. At the very least, if they are comparable, then there is little use in choosing one over the other based on the merits or "resolution".

My display medium will be a transparency, however I was still considering the use of a c-41 film. Thank you for your reply; I appreciate it.

[Drew Wiley]

Don't accept any generic answer. It all depends of the specifics. You are correct in assuming that there are many variables. Technically, you're not dealing with granularity, but with the nature of dye clouds. Because positive film tends to have higher contrast, detail edges often do look sharper. Greater color saturation also lends that impression. But there are ways to juggle all of that. Grain per se is rarely an issue with large format color printing. And perceptible detail is more related to the degree of enlargement, control of focus, and enlarging skills. I've printed from both chrome and color neg sheet film, and even lifetime pro lab owners couldn't tell which was which. But a lot of work can go into a quality print, regardless. I won't address pros or cons scanning negs vs chromes, because I don't print anything digitally, just optically, which eliminates those particular variables. But it might take many projects to truly get ahold of all this. There's a learning curve. Don't overthink it. Start with whatever kind of film you are most comfortable with.

[ClickCL]

That makes perfect sense. Honestly, I think what I took away from interneg's response landed me with the same conclusion you have suggested. It seems that any edge one film type/process has, is not significant enough to make any appreciable difference in light of the many variables that exists. Thank you for the additional insight and knowledge.

[Sasquatchian]

Look at Kodak's own data for RMS Granularity and their data for resolving power. That will tell you that in most cases ISO 100 E-6 emulsions are both finer grained and sharper than C-41 emulsions. You can shoot your own comparison tests and look at the actual film through a low power microscope. You will immediately see the difference. Or, you can buy yourself a drum scanner like I did twenty-two years ago and scan thousands of pieces of all kinds of films and see for yourself. C-41 emulsions generally, but not always have dynamic range advantages and more importantly, the ability to be shot under varying lighting and still deliver exceptional results - for instance, even though it's not recommended, you really can shoot daylight balanced C-41 under tungsten and scan it perfectly or print it if that's your choice. What you see first hand with the drum scanner is that you can scan E-6 at any hardware resolution up to 8000 ppi and use the corresponding auto aperture setting in the scanner, which would mean 3.17 microns for that 8000 ppi call, but through careful testing of many different C-41 films, in order to not have overly grainy scans, you need to match the scanner aperture to the grain size, more or less, of the film, which usually means using the 16 micron aperture, which effectively limits the hardware resolution to 1600 ppi or using the 12.7 micron aperture which yields 2000 ppi. Using the hardware corresponding aperture of 6.35 microns for 4000 ppi or the aforementioned 3.17 microns for 8000 does not yield any additional scan detail, only greatly enhanced, if you want to call it that, grain structure.

Back in May of 2003 I had a photographer from Memphis fly out to California and we made some test scans from his 4x5 Portra film. We did test scans at multiple apertures, and he did the same at a couple other places in Southern California, me using the Howtek 8000, someone using a Hell Chromagraph 3300 (I think) and another using the 8000 ppi ICG scanner. He went home and made comparison prints from all as well as traditional analog projected prints and came to the conclusion that the Howtek made the best scans overall but that the scans at 16 micron were a very close match to projected prints for both sharpness and grain, that the 12.7 micron scans gained a tiny bit of detail but at the expense of increased visible grain and that the 19 micron scans had even less grain but slightly less detail.

The one C-41 film that can hold up to the higher scan resolutions is, of course, the recent Kodak Ektar emulsions, but they also have a look to them that you have to learn to love, and I don't love them. I shoot C-41 Portra for its look and know that when I shoot it that, yes, I'm giving up some ultimate detail but getting dynamic range in return. Toward the end of the film era for shooting commercial job, which was in the very early 2000's I had completely switched over to Portra for shooting architectural jobs. Clients didn't care one way of the other as all they cared about was the final image and didn't know from differences in emulsions, but it was also because I had spent a few years learning how to drum scan color negs when the common thought at most scanning houses was that it couldn't be done. It was just because none or them understood the problems involved. But after 2004 or so there was no reason at all to shoot film for that type of commercial work and it's even more so today. Fine art is one thing but for something like my first and last job of this year - a big architectural job, the results from a 5DSR and a suite of tilt-shift lenses is far better than anything we used to get shooting 4x5 film.

But, jeez, do your own tests and see for yourself. It's not that hard and then you'll know what's right for you and not have to rely on people like me who have spent nearly a quarter century comparing this shit.

[m00dawg]

I have a project I'm preparing for and I'm trying to determine which film I want to work with. I can only imagine, if film resolution is noticeable on my smaller formats, then on the scale of an 8x10 it would make a significant difference, no? Thank you in advanced for your help.

This depends on how large a print or scan you plan on making. I just printed an 11x14 shot on Porta 160 in 35mm and it looks great! Can I see the grain? Yes! Does it matter? Well, yes! I think it makes it look quite nice! Then I have a 30x24 print hanging above my fish tank taken on Provia 100 in 4x5 which I had drum scanned. The detail is stunning but at the distances I typically view the print, the detail isn't necessary.

I guess to take a step back - "pixel peeping" is a dark art when it comes to film photography and you loose a lot of other important qualities if you're just looking for ultimate resolution, especially if you're already in 8x10 territory. Velvia 50 approaches a gigapixel in resolution (Ben Horne has a video where he had one of his images drum scanned at the highest resolution he could and it was something around 900+ mp). If you wanted ultimate resolution, grab some ADOX CMS 20 and maybe use R,G,B filters and make a composite technicolor style solution in post.

Rather, if it were me, I'd find the stock that has the color palette that fits me best and go from there. All the color stocks have nice grain but can different, in some cases considerably, in looks, especially when you include chrome films. To me that will make a far FAR bigger impact on the final product than resolution.

[Drew Wiley]

RMS granularity is valid for comparing related films from the same manufacturer, but it can be a bit misleading if comparing chrome and color neg films, which are different categories. Of course, one can reasonably assume that a slower film like Porta 160 is going to be finer-grained than a fast film like Portra 400. And their advertised claim that Ektar is their finest grained CN film of all is true. But that doesn't mean Velvia 50 is going to have less visible grain because, as a chrome film, it handles that grain differently. But again, in large format work, this is all largely a non-issue, whereas contrast range and specific color palette probably will be an important factor. Forget "pixel peeping". Start printing true optical with fine gear and everything digitally printed starts looking gritty. And yes, people do stick their noses right up to my prints, even 30x40 inch ones. If the detail is there, people will want to take it in. The nonsensical law of "normal viewing distance" is meant to be broken.

[interneg]

Very simply, Hollywood went for neg/ pos processes because it was better qualitatively than pos/ pos processes - there's plenty of hand-waving that goes on about transparency, but most of it comes back to a heck of a lot of scanner operators being pretty bad at inverting and colour balancing negs to the point that they look worse than an equivalent transparency. That shouldn't be the case - I've seen plenty of evidence that even with 1980's materials, VPL did a better job in granularity, sharpness, low contrast detail resolution etc than EPN. And all of those were soundly beaten by Portra and Ektar. And yes, optical prints with current materials in many cases offer aspects of quality and potential for intervention that even the best scanners struggle to deliver.

[Drew Wiley]

Oh, but the hue rendition of color neg films was (past tense) so disappointing for such a long time unless skintones were the priority. And the best motion picture color standard of all was Technicolor - a black and white film process involving tricolor dye transfer, and not color negative film at all. I guess if I had printed much color from medium format or 35mm, I might have gotten nitpicky over this subject, but it gets kinda silly when it comes to the surplus of real estate when using sheet film. Nowadays, I've been shooting MF color a lot more than I once did, due to the high cost of color sheet film. And select color neg films like Ektar indeed hold more detail than former versions did. Taming its cyan idiosyncrasy is a bit more involved, but doable with correct filtration at the time of the shot.

[6x6TLL]

Could you speak a bit more to this point, Drew?



Taming its cyan idiosyncrasy is a bit more involved, but doable with correct filtration at the time of the shot.

[Pere Casals]

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has a resource or personal opinion on the resolution differences between films?

See this document http://www.tmax100.com/photo/pdf/film.pdf

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You see that:

1) Velvia is a sharper color film than Portra, and the sharpest with VR100 exception

2) The sharpest color film mentioned is defunct VR100, a consumer color film manufactured since 1982 at 100lp/mm, while Portra sported 73lp/mm.


Well, first film sharpness is a very complex matter as MTF depends on subject's "microcontrast" (unlike with optics). This is becasue film has halide crystals of different sizes that work or not in different situations, so depending on the test constrast ratings may change, not the same with 1.6:1 contrast than with 1000:1

In the digital minilab era industry had a severe transformation: all color film was to be scanned instead optically enlarged, so today all color negative film datasheets say: "Optimized for scanning"

One of the Optimizations was making the clouds of different color layers overlap better (larger clouds? less completing coupler in the color developer?) to avoid color noise for the scanning discretization, possibly this had an impact in sharpness, being lower. It is difficult to understand that 40 years ancient consumer VR100 was sharper than today's Pro color film !!!

Instead you won't find "Optimized for scanning" in Velvia/Provia datasheets, slides are optimized for projection, not for scanning.

Extreme sharpness capability of film is little seen in real photography, textures do not have 1000:1 microcontrast projected on film allowing those 180 lp/mm that TMX shows in a lab test, instead you may have 3:1 "microcontrast" in the many textures.

1000:1 contrast situation, when TMX allows 180lp/mm is 10 stops!!! contrast projected in 180 line pairs for each mm !!! this is a situation you won't find in real photography.

... but anyway it explains why a silhouette shape can be very sharp, as the contrast to the background can be very high.

_____________________________


All that was theory that is not much relevant as with LF you have insane lots of Image Quality. In practice... what you should care is illumination quality to get a sound image, and learning the film sensitometric and spectral behaviour.

[Drew Wiley]

That's interesting, Pere, but pre-Ektar and pre E100 chrome too. Lot's of other info is also somewhat out of date. With Kodak sheet film, "optimized for scanning" seems to have more to do with a slightly textured coating than anything pertaining to the dye clouds, other than the usual progressive improvements.

[interneg]

That's interesting, Pere, but pre-Ektar and pre E100 chrome too. Lot's of other info is also somewhat out of date. With Kodak sheet film, "optimized for scanning" seems to have more to do with a slightly textured coating than anything pertaining to the dye clouds, other than the usual progressive improvements.

Yes - it was the supercoating of some films that had to be tweaked for scan compatibility - Fuji as well as Kodak. The rest of his claims about MTF (and muddling it up with ISO resolution testing) and dye cloud size are disconnected from the realities of imaging science.

[Drew Wiley]

6X6. Let me just briefly reply to your question from a practical rather than sensotometric standpoint, lest the thread fall into an unnecessarily complicated tailspin. Ektar is not artificially warmed like ordinary color neg films oriented to skintone reproduction. With its higher contrast and greater overall saturation, it is capable of handling a variety of hues more accurately than previous CN films, but has an Achilles heel of potential cyan crossover at both ends of its native latitude. You need to carefully meter it, shoot it at box speed of 100, and realize that you get only about a stop extra, either over or under, of what you'd ordinarily get with a chrome film, before encountering problems. It's important to correct for color temp issues at the time of the shot because post-correction will either be difficult or impossible once the dye curves have begun crossing over. It's not just a matter of overall balance, but of how the three respective dye spikes maintain their individual integrity before mud starts getting mixed, and can't be unmixed. So I'd recommend carrying a light pink skylight filter for minor color balance correction, something like an 81A or KR1.5 for bluish overcast conditions, and something stronger like an 81C or KR3 for deep blue shade under intense open blue skies. The tricker question is how to handle mixed lighting with warm overall lighting, but deep blue shadows in the same scene. It is possible to pre-flash the film with a diffused amber warming filter and gray disc for around two stops below middle gray; but this requires a fair amount of testing to get right. There is also a new Tiffen 812 filter available coated which has a similar effect to combining an 81B warming filter plus 1B skylight. This is designed to correct overly blue shadows (which have an annoying cyan cast with Ektar), and if too warm, can be more realistically corrected during the printing step than no filtration at all. Hope this helps.

[6x6TLL]

Thanks Drew for the exhaustive, informative and practical guidelines.

Apropos Technicolor, the process you describe sounds similar to Kodachrome, which was one of my favorite films (along with Velvia, they complimented each other nicely depending on what/where I was shooting) before "mamma took my Kodachrome away" :-(

[Pere Casals]

Yes - it was the supercoating of some films that had to be tweaked for scan compatibility - Fuji as well as Kodak. The rest of his claims about MTF (and muddling it up with ISO resolution testing) and dye cloud size are disconnected from the realities of imaging science.

You are not well informed, please read for example the Ektar 100 datasheet:

https://imaging.kodakalaris.com/sites/prod/files/files/products/e4046_ektar_100.pdf


It says: TECHNOLOGY: Micro-Structure Optimized KODAK T-GRAIN Emulsions >>>>> BENEFIT: Ideal for scanning


The optimization for scanning relies in the micro-structure, so in the final dye clouds.


Look, perhaps you are aware that a high production Frontier has an area sensor with a Bayer mosaic (not a linear one like flatbeds). If dye clouds of different colors do not overlap well you boost color noise in the discretization.

Take a decent microscope and observe strips of the pre/post digital minilab dawn at 1000X, you will learn what happened. Weren't you aware?



Of course manufacturers never mentioned the clouds because decreasing noise has an slight drawback in the sharpness, a bit like with OLPF in DSLRs.

Kodak VR100 (since 1982) was incorporating Tabular T-Grain yet, probably T-Grain was developed to improve color films that were the vast majority of the business, T-Max BW films were a just sequel.

Since 1996 all color films were re-engineered or replaced to deliver an optimal micro-structure for scanning in the digital minilabs, the big business. The supercoating modification is only some icing on the cake.

[Drew Wiley]

Minilab "quality" was always on the awful side. Amateur consumers didn't care much about grain as long as Grandma's face didn't turn out green. That was pretty much determined by the character of dye clouds anyway. What was a huge incentive to T-grain R&D was the cost of silver during that era, in which Kodak found itself in direct competition with commodities brokers, and how to make the particles more efficient in thinner emulsions for actual black and white film use, while, at the same time, replacing multiple b&w films with fewer more versatile ones, more cost efficiently. Color film use far less silver, and T grain for color emulsions seems to be fairly recent. Otherwise, I don't scan, but do appreciate how the new supercoating helps to suppress Newton rings somewhat, though I still use AN glass too.

[interneg]

Drew - T-grain's biggest advantages are that it allows drastically better sensitivity for a given amount of silver and with better 'coverage' (Bob Shanebrook, 2nd Edn, pg.18) - and with finer more densely packed flatter grains, coverage gets better - especially in complex multi-layer emulsions - which also improves scanning and darkroom performance. It's a misnomer propagated by the inept that scanning and darkroom printing of films have significantly different technical requirements overall. There have been attempts at making scan-only materials and they all failed to have any longevity. The major change with regards to minilabs which Pere's ahistoriscist claims get badly wrong, was the way that the entire Portra family was designed to print on the same 'channel'/ baseline colour correction (Shanebrook, 2nd edn, pp.45-48).

The Bunker Hunt affair probably provided a convenient distraction from where a bigger need for higher resolution, better sensitivity films had come from - the Key Hole and Corona reconnaissance satellites. And if the first T-grain containing consumer market films launched in 1982, the product R&D (as opposed to the fundamental principles) had probably started at least 5 years earlier - likely straight after Kodacolor 400 had launched. The same satellite programmes seem to have been important in driving significant technological steps in the use of ESTAR base etc.

According to Shanebrook, TMax 100 had to have an extra thick gelatin supercoat added to slow down the development speed to something more acceptably 'normal' compared to other films in the market - with SO variants for solar photography without the overcoating & protective 'gelatin rails' (Shanebrook, 2nd edn, pg.24).

[Drew Wiley]

I don't know how far back T-grain research went, probably quite a ways. The Hunt brothers nearly obtained a complete monopoly on the silver trade in the late 70's; but several years before that I can recall the panic of photographers as good black and white papers were getting unaffordable, and it was inevitable that certain film and paper products were going to outright disappear. A substitute was particularly needed for Super-XX, which was a thick emulsion film with an exceptionally long straight line. The first version of TMax 100 appeared on the market in 1986 and I immediately started using it, and the earlier grittier version of Tmax 400 soon thereafter. I've salvage printed some of my own first 4x5 shots of both with the past few weeks. All of this was long before mini-labs and so forth digitally printed. Even the discontinuance of dye transfer supplies hadn't been announced yet, and optical Cibachrome printing was in its heyday. I don't remember if Ektar 25 adopted T-grain technology, but it had serious hue reproduction issues and never found the market niche which current Ektar 100 has.
Estar base was necessarily used for any film requiring dimensional stability. Remember, most advanced printing skills still required mechanical registration, and still do for people like me who print exclusively darkroom-style. Acetate-based films are a horrible headache to deal with in that respect, though I had to do a lot of it. I don't know the detailed motives of how TMax films were overcoated. But one huge advantage is that it made them more robust in handling. The FP4 of that time (prior to FP4 plus) had a rather soft emulsion, and there was still interleafing paper between sheets in the box. The greater scratch resistance in handling and tray processing is still one of the premium features or advantages of TMax products. Due to their very carefully designed spectral qualities and curve flexibility, plus detail capacity, these films were introduced to replace several previous product lines, including the color separation tasks of Super-XX and Color Sep Film, the industrial and forensic applications of Tech Pan, the general usage of Tri-X, the studio usage of Plus X Pan. Longtime loyalists to certain favorite films weren't amused at having to switch to something fussier in exposure and development, so that made quite an opening for Ilford to expand their film selection. As far a aerial surveillance is concerned, I've seen a number of classified optical prints from the era with my own eyes; and I'm convinced that certain branches of the military and intelligence operations were fully twenty years ahead of anything on the public market. Equipment-wise, the public will never be able to afford the kind of photo gear they had. Some of it was made locally, and still is. Real film is still the best option for highly-detailed, intuitively assessed aerial reconnaissance. Satellites are better at telling you where to look, or for tracking specific changes in real time, but often require specialized analysts to interpret. Nothing is better than WWII style overlapping b&w stereo photos that you can view 3D with your own eyes under a stereoscope. It's awfully fatiguing to the eyes, however. I once used a lot of these for geological and archeological mapping, but the USGS had automated methods for making topo maps from precise sequential aerial photos.

[interneg]

Drew - aerial photography has certain advantages that films at sea level don't have, especially in terms of shadows and exposure scale - on the other hand, they need to cut through haze and image tiny objects at huge distance - which is why people get in such a tangle with the repurposed Agfa films.

From Bob's book, the persistence of triacetate in LF film bases was because of the need to enable pre-photoshop compositing methods using solvents and emulsion stripping.

[Drew Wiley]

It's just the opposite, Interneg! Triacetate is not dimensionally stable. Ever try to order a pin register bar for an extant punch? You submit your punched sample either on mylar (Estar) or brass shim stock, or they send it back. As far as acetate sheet film base, that was just an interlude for Kodak starting after Ektachrome 64 up till E100G. Fuji adopted the superior polyester base late with Astia 100F and Velvia 100F only. Almost all b&w sheet films were on polyester base all along, at least in modern decades. Acetate is hell to maintain register with mechanically. Other advantages of Estar is that it's stiffer and sags less in a holder, and is more robust in automated development.

[interneg]

Drew - I know how dimensional wonky triacetate is - put a sheet of 4x5 on even a seemingly cool light table & watch it curl! Fastest way to tell whether the base is estar or not. What I was pointing out is that on the available documentary evidence, Kodak made no sheet transparency films on estar in 1988 (but all sheet colour and BW neg, lab films, separation films etc were on estar), & then according to Bob Shanebrook's account phased them in over the next decade as computers displaced traditional compositing methods, finally allowing for a more dimensionally stable product to be made. When making dye transfer seps, you should not need to expose the camera neg to heat shifts sufficient to cause registration to wander.

The same 1988 product coating list in Bob's book recounts no fewer than 35 aerial film SO- materials - some of which were in the resolution range of ADOX's CMS 20.

[Pere Casals]

The same 1988 product coating list in Bob's book recounts no fewer than 35 aerial film SO- materials - some of which were in the resolution range of ADOX's CMS 20.

Yes...

In particular Aerecon High Altitude, ISO 16, 630 l/mm at TOC 1000:1 contrast, but amazingly 320 l/mm at TOC 1.6:1 low contrast. ...and possibly not all films were disclosed.

Aerial duplicating film may reach 800/250 l/mm depending on contrast.


CMS 20 may reach 800lp/mm (1600 l/m), catalog says, but this is document Microfilm, probably less suitable than AHA or TP for Recon.


https://www.kodak.com/uploadedFiles/Corporate/Industrial_Materials_Group/EN_as57.pdf


The 1414 emulsion for example was coated in 0.001" thick film,it was used in 30 miles long camera rolls, a lot of shooting. Some rolls contained different kinds of film (Shanebrook's ).

[Drew Wiley]

I can't get into Kodak's too-many-tentacled head at the time, and it would be up to insiders to tell the story. But Fuji has stuck mainly with triacetate to this day, and what modern scanners and digital post-correction has allowed is extremely rapid workflow where dimensional stability is less an issue. There must be some other reason, perhaps reducing the variety of overall substrates required for both b&w and color sheet films. In the interim, Fuji tended to dominate the color chrome business, and their films got scanned just as much, various ways. So I don't quite see the relation. Having around over a decade's worth of 8x10 chromes on miserable acetate, I went through one heck of a lot of nitpicky dust-free masking and remastering of some of those during our relatively few months of stable humidity onto polyester master duplicates like Astia 100F. Now some of those have become third generation Provia contact internegs for sake of RA4 printing. But the color quality is better than ever, and even fine detail has held up well. A ton of work, but nobody is going to mistake those for inkjets!

[Drew Wiley]

Pere - most modern recon filming was on true color, not b&w, and certainly not something like Tech Pan or microfilm. The whole point is something which can be intuitively analyzed. Drones and satellites are more convenient for infrared, UV, false color etc. I know there are very sophisticated hybrid modes in use, but how soon all that began is probably highly classified.

[Pere Casals]

Pere - most modern recon filming was on true color,

More than true color, false color. Camouflage detection film extents Red channel sensitivity to IR, so vegetation is displayed pinky and camouflage is seen original, you know were tanks and guns are.

But modern uniforms and camouflages reflect IR like vegetation, it looks, so spectral camouflage detection it's not useful anymore, now they are located by whatsapp traffic :)

Compare color of uniform at left and right:

203886

Soldiers at left have the cap/beret in tmx underfixed pinky, but soldier at left/front wears a detectable camouflage.

https://www.guns.com/news/2013/06/08/a-wwii-kodak-film-type-once-used-to-detect-camouflage-revived-in-a-photo-documentary-on-the-congo-video

Kodak Aerochrome contributed to detect military assets in the WWII, but I guess that at some point somebody realized that those tanks camoufled with natural vegetation were not bombed... while those under fabric camouflage were soon destroyed.

Color, or false color, was used for that until this was discovered by rivals, and used to divert bombings to empty places. Instead high altitude Aerial recon to detect strategic infraestructures/activity/ships would have required BW, the 320 lp/mm AHA film delivers at 1.6:1 contrast were an asset, satelital glass could resolve 400lp/mm for sure.

[Bruce Watson]

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has a resource or personal opinion on the resolution differences between films?

Well, you did ask for an opinion. Here's mine. In LF, it just doesn't matter. That's one of the major reasons to move up to LF.

One of the things you get by moving to LF is the considerably smaller enlargement ratio between film size and print size. Which more or less renders resolution differences between films moot. Not that you'll ever be limited by the resolution of a film in the first place. But that's not what you asked.

[Drew Wiley]

Pere - you're speculating as usual. But being a large format forum, it's not THAT large ... I'm not planning on backpacking with some exotic camera that weighs half a ton anytime soon. Something with a familiar Kodak or Fuji or Ilford product label on the box is plenty good enough for my purposes.

[Pere Casals]

Pere - most modern recon filming was on true color,

Pere - you're speculating as usual


As usual no speculation, one thing was funny orthoimagery at 8000ft and another thing was serious military recon from high altitude or from orbit, in those situations you don't want a color film sporting 40lp/mm, but a BW taking 300 to 600 lp/mm depending on contrast. If you still want color then you take 3 or 4 BW images with different color filters.

[Drew Wiley]

You're guessing. I've seen color shots from 20, 30, 40, even 50 years ago that would be difficult or impossible to match with any kind of consumer color film or camera equipment today, things you wouldn't even believe if I told you. And I have no idea what is actually possible now, though am aware of certain exotic technologies behind them. I just know that you aren't even remotely on the right track, Pere. You're still thinking on WWII terms. Just get ahold of a CIA, NSA, or NASA credit card without a spending limit, and I'll tell you where you can go camera shopping. They'll explain the rest, if you don't get arrested and interrogated first. But if you want a set of clues, think about how advanced hybrid medical microscopes work at one extreme, separating and then precisely recombining specific wavelengths of light with magnetically controlled mirrors, and the latest computer-controlled super-observatories at the other extreme, with their highly advanced hybrid optics, and design something in the middle. You could open your own internet spy supply company during this covid crisis.

[interneg]

Pere, those resolutions you are throwing around are lines/mm, not line pairs/mm or cyc/mm - halve them if you want to compare with more regular films. Then look at how badly those Aerochromes (and Aerocolor) really perform. They were largely for mapping or specific camouflage detection etc - if you want to waste hours of time, you can look up the rectifying enlargers made by Wild, Zeiss etc. The BW films were and are for high res recon. 5.5" rollfilm tended to be used for recon, 9.5" for mapping, though the satellite missions apparently used 9.5" on super thin bases. And 3409 is nowhere near the highest resolving disclosed aerial film Kodak made - amongst others there was SO-209 with a disclosed Resolving Power of 1160 lines/mm (580 lp/mm) on a 1.5mil (38 microns) ESTAR base - by the looks of it, designed for a diffraction limited f2.8 optical system. The problem with all of these films is that they were not designed for pleasing pictorial purposes but for specific military/ industrial purposes that required the ability to image an object of a specified diameter from a specified altitude. A look at 3409's spec sheet will show very clearly that it is designed for high contrast resolution alone - over sharpness or low granularity, both of which matter a lot more in regular photography at ground level.

Drew, I think you mean the NRO? And FLIR, amongst others, are industry standard manufacturers of high res aerial imaging kit these days - at least the civilian accessible stuff.

[Pere Casals]

Pere, those resolutions you are throwing around are lines/mm, not line pairs/mm or cyc/mm - halve them if you want to compare with more regular films. Then look at how badly those Aerochromes (and Aerocolor) really perform. They were largely for mapping or specific camouflage detection etc - if you want to waste hours of time, you can look up the rectifying enlargers made by Wild, Zeiss etc. The BW films were and are for high res recon. 5.5" rollfilm tended to be used for recon, 9.5" for mapping, though the satellite missions apparently used 9.5" on super thin bases. And 3409 is nowhere near the highest resolving disclosed aerial film Kodak made - amongst others there was SO-209 with a disclosed Resolving Power of 1160 lines/mm (580 lp/mm) on a 1.5mil (38 microns) ESTAR base - by the looks of it, designed for a diffraction limited f2.8 optical system. The problem with all of these films is that they were not designed for pleasing pictorial purposes but for specific military/ industrial purposes that required the ability to image an object of a specified diameter from a specified altitude. A look at 3409's spec sheet will show very clearly that it is designed for high contrast resolution alone - over sharpness or low granularity, both of which matter a lot more in regular photography at ground level.


Yes, you are right... I missread the l/mm

[Drew Wiley]

No Interneg, nobody like you're referring to. I'm speaking of people often working from multi-billion dollar purchase orders, either classified or multi-national, as in huge international observatories, which now involve many synchronized giant flexible mirrors, though they are capable of prototyping just about anything for anyone at the right price. And I am only aware of how certain segments of surveillance were done up to about 20 yrs ago, one of which involved truly state of the art 10X10 color enlargers (which I've personally seen the inner guts of, though not whole machines) for very precise large true color images readily understood by decision makers, in contrast to satellite imagery, in a classified facility where absolutely no digital technology was allowed, lest there would be any doctored-up Photoshoppish claims (alas, we have a history of starting wars based on sheer cartoons, dubious xerox sheets, and mere rumors; but those were predetermined and not objective decisions). I've seen prints of shots taken with shipboard cameras probably nobody on a forum like this would even believe possible, and don't want to talk about for other reasons (people like me aren't even supposed to see those pictures). And I've interacted with extreme custom optics manufacturers in this area as a supplier of incidental supplies, including those who made the Hubble correction lenses. So I can sorta put two and two together at times, but am not an optical engineer myself, and can hardly imagine what is possible to do now because it factors in all kinds of potential hybrid options which began defying the limits of conventional lens design a couple of decades back. I'm also aware of several other clandestine inventions that would sound awfully sci-fi, but so did landing on the moon at one time. This area is a hub for that kind of innovation - military applications are nearly as big as consumer electronics R&D, but bit by bit, things slips out. That's why every single aspect of tech around here attracts industrial spies like moths to a lightbulb.
I'd be happy just to find an affordable old Zeiss microscope and look at tiny critters in a drop of water with my own eyes once again.

[interneg]

Drew - if those enlargers were on Durst chassis, whoever was telling you about those enlargers was pretty likely being a bit economical with the actualité of their use. HK, Fotar, De Vere Apollo/ Vulcan chassis would be more believable, but most of them already came with excellent light sources for the purpose - and they had rollfilm and on-baseboard vacuum easel capabilities that dwarf anything Durst or the guy in Oregon ever seem to have come up with. Was Jens Jensen the source of the 'no digital allowed facility' story?

[Drew Wiley]

You're still in the toy realm, Interneg. So am I, and I built a custom color enlarger myself that dwarfs my Durst L184 color unit. I'll just leave it where I left it. I've seen the guts of the colorhead with my own eyes and handled em. I was researching my own design and wanted to detour the horrible heat and maintenance issues of big Durst and smaller ZBE units. That was in Cibachrome days when very bright colorheads were required, and I already had a Durst mural colorhead, and it doubled my utility bill. I never learned who built their chassis. There were six of them, at an initial cost of about 200K apiece. The colorheads were all true RGB additive for sake of optimal color accuracy (it does make a difference), and were one of the last R&D projects of Durst commercial division just before it shut down. Those heads were never marketed to anyone except whoever built the enlargers for the NSA. Designing a high-output simultaneous-additive enlarger is no easy task, believe me. You can't fake it. Fotar, DeVere, etc, never made anything like that. A few relative toys suitable for small fast RA4 prints have been marketed over the years, and big SEQUENTIAL additive pulsed-xenon heads were once made for the printing industy. As far as Jens goes, he was a chronic liar, but also a superb machinist, whether one could stomach his slippery business model or not. And he made most of his money on mandatory service contracts to big labs, rather than on the equipment itself. I have a friend who purchased well over a million dollars of gear from Jens, and for that kind of money, Jens actually delivered what he promised. Chris Burkett also got all his gear from him. He stiffed me, but then, as poetic justice, I was offered all those enlargers he sold to my friend for free upon retirement from that aspect of his lab. I just didn't have any more space for more 8x10 units except for one; but heck, even that one enlarger left me 20K ahead. Jens owed me some film punch components to supplement my original Condit gear. But Jens never built the NSA enlargers back east, nor was he ever equipped to make those kind of highly specialized filter components, any more than he could have fabricated a few especially rare Apo El Nikkor enlarging lenses he got ahold of to sell. He would have gone broke just trying, and with no conceivable market. They had to be changed out as a compete integrated set. He just happened to buy a lot of Durst commercial division leftovers as a big lot deal. And again, I can't go into detail, but I've been at a number of dinner parties attended by ex-spooks from these agencies and think tanks, and already knew about the kinds of very sophisticated cross-checks in place, whether the political policy makers take advantage of that kind of expertise and safety valve or not (often they don't, but then pin the blame on someone else when something goes terribly wrong). I was simply designing something one-off for myself, and was a bit too early to take advantage of computerized sine-wave control, but glad I didn't buy into it because the software and computer gear involved goes obsolete so fast. ZBE helped me with some of the electronic feedback brains because they had done the same for those classified units, so one more distinct confirmation. They weren't coordinated with Jens in any manner. All he knew about was switching out filters. I just have to deal with popping light bulbs, schizophrenic triacs, and a block and tackle system to service my own huge heavy colorhead - but it does cool efficiently. And to synchronize the two independently cooled hemispheres, I had to employ a joint monitoring system, which ZBE had already developed. Otherwise, I never could have afforded one. That could just have been done via routine printing tests and a color densitometer at the NSA; but the high heat of the enclosed Durst heads, which were never designed in the first place for the significantly higher density of additive filters, blistered out the dichroic filter sets within every six months and would have made precise synchronization unpredictable without internal feedback. Again, confirmed not only by own previous experience with high-wattage Durst, but by three different sources with little in common other than a specific end user, and certainly no admiration for one another in the case of Jens vs ZBE. Darn expensive rigs to maintain. I have no idea whether those things are still in operation or not. Even Jens couldn't make this kind of stuff up; too much of it not only makes sense, but lies behind my own working design either by inclusion or deliberate exclusion. I garnered clues wherever I could get them, that's all, and then took my own direction.

[Bernice Loui]

Uber film resolution alone is only one potential facet of an expressive image.
Consider the expressive abilities of prints made using sorta-focus or Soft-Focus lenses.


Bernice

[Pere Casals]

I've seen color shots from 20, 30, 40, even 50 years ago that would be difficult or impossible to match with any kind of consumer color film or camera equipment today,

Are you sure that those were not 3 BW shots with color filters? Are you were guessing that it was 300lp/mm color film?



You're guessing.

No guess, in the military (SF) Color and BW orthophotomaps where available alognside regular maps. The most useful was the BW one, with a magnifier every terrain feature was perfectly detailed and precision navigation with those maps was a total joy, no gps was needed, and even after walking all night long with no moon and no night vision, guided by starts, at dawn one could exact the precise place by taking a look to the BW map and identifiying the stone one was treading. With other maps position was also located, but with the BW ones there was no doubt from exact feature identification. Color maps were nicer, but those that worked were the BW ones, of course, no doubt. No guess, I was there.

Also all intelligence was based in BW photographs allowing identification of "enemy" assets from high altitude covering a large area.

Of course all terrain has been photographed in color and BW, but military intelligence was using BW shots.

[Drew Wiley]

Ho hum. You seem to be confusing this with a Boy Scout outing, Pere. Please tell me something I didn't already know when I was 8 years old. I grew up getting from Point A to B in the wilderness, my dad had been an expert surveyor, one of my teenage hobbies was borrowing aerial stereo shots and intensely studying them and specialized making maps from them myself, and then when I moved here to the coast and my nephew moved in with me, he earned his way through school doing mapmaking for the USGS, NASA (moon), and then private map distributors. I studied geological mapping in college. Now go tell me how battles are fought on horseback with bows and arrows. About all I can sum this topic up with is the hypothesis my older brother long held, that certain state of the art consumer films are simply military films which were declassified once something even fancier came along for their use, or, to rephrase it, the underlying technology was somehow repurposed for consumer use. I really don't know; I'm not a film chemist. And no, nothing I've ever personally seen looked like a tricolor camera shot; that is something I would recognize. And no, I'm not thinking about 300lp/mm color film; that was back was in the stone age. It's a fun topic, but largely irrelevant to what we do with view cameras, thank goodness.

[Jody_S]

I'm not going to comment or speculate on military technology, but for a couple of years I experimented with a Konica imagesetter infrared film, on a rather thin base. There was a very noticeable difference in resolution between that film and anything else I've ever shot. I gather that's why people still pay high prices for long-expired Kodak Tech Pan.

Of course that's not why I shoot large format. If all I cared about was resolution, I would buy the latest dSLR and fancy lenses and not have to worry about chemicals and scanner resolution.

[Pere Casals]

I'm not going to comment or speculate on military technology, but for a couple of years I experimented with a Konica imagesetter infrared film, on a rather thin base. There was a very noticeable difference in resolution between that film and anything else I've ever shot. I gather that's why people still pay high prices for long-expired Kodak Tech Pan.

Of course that's not why I shoot large format. If all I cared about was resolution, I would buy the latest dSLR and fancy lenses and not have to worry about chemicals and scanner resolution.


Interesting, what EI did you use for the imagesetting film ? Now that kind of film it can be bought at $8 per m2 , it can be a choice for ULF experimentation...

[Jody_S]

Interesting, what EI did you use for the imagesetting film ? Now that kind of film it can be bought at $8 per m2 , it can be a choice for ULF experimentation...

About 0.2? 3 stops lower than the lowest setting on my Pentax V. I bought 3 100ft x 12" rolls for $20 ea, IIRC.

[Pere Casals]

About 0.2? 3 stops lower than the lowest setting on my Pentax V. I bought 3 100ft x 12" rolls for $20 ea, IIRC.

thanks

[Drew Wiley]

Tech Pan is just that - designed for technical and forensic applications. I still have plenty of 8x10 for certain lab applications. I don't know what anyone sees in it for general use; but I tried it for that long ago, just like many people. There are way better pictorial options, esp for LF.

[Pere Casals]

Tech Pan is just that - designed for technical and forensic applications. I still have plenty of 8x10 for certain lab applications. I don't know what anyone sees in it for general use; but I tried it for that long ago, just like many people. There are way better pictorial options, esp for LF.

With TP you may get the "usual" LF image quality in a MF shot, and even a careful 35mm shot can be near as sharp as many 4x5" shots. Of course it also has drawbaks.

Adox CMS 20 is even more extreme than TP, but it can be used perfectly with a careful processing, I have several CMS 20 4x5" shots that are atonishingly detailed, YMMV if this is important or not.

Anyway CMS 20 sensitometry with POTA at ISO 6 allows a regular pictorial usage with not many limitations, you have 6 easily usable stops, 4 linear, so with accurate metering it is suitable for many scenes.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/53687643@N04/45541983072

203970

[Drew Wiley]

Fine for a spy Minox copying a piece of paperwork decades ago, Pere. Might still be fun today for some. But for large format and even medium format general photography, many much more practical films have been engineered. Finer grain can be helpful; but for me, overall tonal response and detail acutance combined with realistic speed are factors a lot more important than sheer fineness of grain. Yes, a careful 35mm shot with a very selective film and exceptional lens can be nearly as sharp as a truly sloppy 4x5 shot taken with a grainy film and marginal quality lens; but that's not using the same set of scales. It was the marketing ruse Kodak employed for early Tech Pan ads in popular photo magazines, and had little relation to real world applications. I thumbed through some old 6x7 Tech Pan negs yesterday of a quite interesting scene, but quickly shuffled them back to the bottom of the stack simply due to the relatively disappointing printing qualities of Tech Pan. The day before, I encountered a Tech Pan 6X6 print of me in the mountains taken by a friend using a very high quality Zeiss lens, and who routinely shot Tech Pan for years, and knew all the relevant tricks. The lack of tonality in the extremes was highly evident as usual. Tech Pan was extended red, so could kinda wiggle into the threshold of infrared applications using a 29 filter, yet provided fine grain unlike true infrared films. That made it quite useful for certain forensic applications, but not really as a substitute for infrared films or the kind of ghostly look they provide of foliage.

[interneg]

Uber film resolution alone is only one potential facet of an expressive image.
Consider the expressive abilities of prints made using sorta-focus or Soft-Focus lenses.


Bernice

That's the least of it - the high contrast resolution of a film matters if you are trying to image a 0.6m object on Earth from space, while the MTF performance and RMS Grain don't have significant impacts in that particular application, nor does the latitude need to be terribly great. On the other hand, for photography at ground level, high contrast resolution is irrelevant if the MTF is not good, nor the RMSG anywhere close to films near enough 3 stops faster. The fixation on high contrast resolution is a lazy, macho numbers game that willfully ignores almost the entirety of photographic science's approaches to understanding the ability of photographic emulsions to record and reproduce information since the early 1950's!

[neil poulsen]

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has a resource or personal opinion on the resolution differences between films? I have very little experience with LF but have a decent amount of experience shooting other formats up to LF. . . .

What size print do you want to make. Are you scanning?

[Wheathins]

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has a resource or personal opinion on the resolution differences between films? I have very little experience with LF but have a decent amount of experience shooting other formats up to LF.

I have noticed that generally E-6 films seem to have an edge over C-41 films, but with that said, there are so many variables it's hard to confirm if what I am seeing is reality. I would be very interested to see a side by side test done or hear some of your experiences. Also, where do you think silver gelatin stands against the two. Obviously we would be comparing like film speeds and more specifically the fine grain, slower films.

I have a project I'm preparing for and I'm trying to determine which film I want to work with. I can only imagine, if film resolution is noticeable on my smaller formats, then on the scale of an 8x10 it would make a significant difference, no? Thank you in advanced for your help.


EDIT: I realize now, I should have posted this in the Darkroom: Film, Processing & Printing category. If there is a way to move or delete this thread, that would be great. Thanks

No problem, thread moved. --OrenB/w films generally have larger grain than color negative or positive at a given ISO. There are certain film/dev combos that this doesn't hold for. I've found that grain size and acutance are often at odds with each. With fine grain developers being low acutance, and high acutance being higher grain. There really isn't any winning with either option. Either your grain is super fine, but the image is soft when enlarged, or your edges are crisp, but the grain is larger. In my experience, the better option digitally is finer grain, then sharpen. In the darkroom, the higher acutance developers often enlarge farther since the grain is pleasant. Finer grain developers just get mushy if you enlarge them too far. Everyone gets too hung up on resolution, I can drum scan anything I want at 8000 ppi. Does that mean I can make a print from file at 300 ppi? Not necessarily. The limits of b/w film seem to be around a 12x enlargement, which means you need a 4800ppi scan. I usually use fp4, maybe bigger enlargements can be made from rpx 25 or cms 20. Though I would think that the lenses become the limiting factor.

For color slide film, there isn't much grain at all. Most the image is dye. The more you enlarge a slide, the softer I gets, though the grain shows up more. Sharpening really helps slides. Color negative film has noticable grain compared to slide, but finer grained vs b/w. Ektar 100 can be enlarged up to 16x before the grain becomes too large for my taste. Where e100 or provia just gets soft at this enlargement.

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[Drew Wiley]

Hmm ... I just start to notice Ektar grain at around 10X, up close, that is. At what point it might become apparent to a casual observer, I can't say. But 10X is my personal boundary of maximum enlargement. I would't go that big with any chrome film. It has nothing to do with the respective grain sizes, because we're really talking about distinctions in dye clouds rather than grain clustering per se like in black and white films. And given the fact chromes are inherently more contrasty, apples to apples subject contrast range wise, chromes therefore have more evident micro distinctions.

It will be interesting how my next round of internegs from old 4x5 of various chromes (Ekta 64, several generations of Provia and Velvia, plus Astia and previous Kodak E100G) - all contact printed onto Portra 160 (unsharp supplemental silver contrast included in most cases) - how they'll turn out in RA4 prints. Previous one enlarged onto 8x10 Portra, or 8x10 contacted to 8x10, responded wonderfully. In most, I avoided open sky subjects, but did do a couple of those. But my aim in only around 7X enlargement from these 4x5 contacts. Don't expect visible grain will be an issue. With the still bigger 8x10 ones, grain in undetectable even in 30X40 inch prints. The whole "grain" topic tends to get overblown in my opinion, at least in color film applications.

[Wheathins]

RMS granularity is valid for comparing related films from the same manufacturer, but it can be a bit misleading if comparing chrome and color neg films, which are different categories. Of course, one can reasonably assume that a slower film like Porta 160 is going to be finer-grained than a fast film like Portra 400. And their advertised claim that Ektar is their finest grained CN film of all is true. But that doesn't mean Velvia 50 is going to have less visible grain because, as a chrome film, it handles that grain differently. But again, in large format work, this is all largely a non-issue, whereas contrast range and specific color palette probably will be an important factor. Forget "pixel peeping". Start printing true optical with fine gear and everything digitally printed starts looking gritty. And yes, people do stick their noses right up to my prints, even 30x40 inch ones. If the detail is there, people will want to take it in. The nonsensical law of "normal viewing distance" is meant to be broken.Glad I'm not crazy! I've always thought inkjet prints look pixelated, especially close up. Too bad I can't make color prints.

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[ghosttuner]

Glad I'm not crazy! I've always thought inkjet prints look pixelated, especially close up. Too bad I can't make color prints. gbwhatsapp (https://gbapps.net/gbwhatsapp-apk/)

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What printer you are using?

[Tin Can]

Be very happy IF you can SEE the dif

I cannot