color film for 4x5 advice

[newt]

I have not shot color film in about 20 years. When I did I proofed everything with Polaroid 55. Obviously that is no longer an option. I am interested in shooting some color along side the black and white I am also shooting. Not a factor in my question, but I am shooting 30 year expired tech pan, and developing in pmk. My prospects are to work very slowly, first shooting black and white, developing one sheet at a time as I go, and then shooting the color once I have that right. If that is not maddening enough, I am limited by the available lighting, which is 3000k. I can supplement this with a few mini maglites! I realize this sounds utterly ridiculous. Worse is that I really like the color as I see it on the glas. B&H offers only 3 kodak films in 4x5, Ektar seems to be the better choice. I assume it is daylight balance since there is no "T" and the reviews all talk about landscape. Do I need to use a warming filter, or can this be balanced later in printing or in photoshop? Is it true about the wide latitude in this color neg film, and if so just how does that work? Is it that it doesn't matter so much if it is over exposed, or do I need to be mindful, and adjust the processing if it is overexposed. If the latter then I would need to know that ahead of time, which begs the question why I couldnt expose it spot on in the first place, which I likely will since I am essentially proofing with bw film first.

[xkaes]

Hello,
While 4x5 color film is not cheap, it's easy to run a few tests with whatever lighting setup you will be using. Perhaps yu have a Kodak or other color test chart. I've used Ektar 25 -- 35mm for decades -- and 100 4x5" as well. I shoot at 1/2 the recommended ISO, based in my tests and tastes. It is daylight balanced, but you can easily get a correcting filter for 3000K -- or whatever -- or you can correct under the enlarger or in a computer -- or all three. I'd do it up front, but that assumes all your lighting will be the same. Ektar is way easier to use than Tech Pan.

[Drew Wiley]

No - DO NOT try to correct that amount of color imbalance in PS. Everything will be out of whack. Even the best mortician in town won't be able to make Ektar after that kind of disaster look worthy of open-coffin viewing. Can't you just use blue light balancing gels over your studio lamps? Those are relatively inexpensive. Then, if you achieve the correct rated daylight color temperature of 5500K that way, or even more easily via an equivalent blue conversion filter over the camera lens instead (but not both), rate the film at its BOX SPEED of 100. Very important. Ektar needs to be rather precisely exposed, just like a slide film. If your lamps are actually 3000K, as measured with a good color temp meter, then you would need an 80A bluish conversion filter over the lens.

[Kiwi7475]

I second Drew’s recommendation above. If you tried anyway without correcting during the exposure, you will find it a nightmare to correct in post — it won’t be a simple temp adjustment. Using correcting gels/filters is the way to go.

Also maybe you want to try in 35 or 120 format before committing to 4x5 sheets. You can run plenty of combinations (color corrections and exposure) on one roll.

[BrianShaw]

May I make just one more suggestion? Please download and read the film data sheets. They address many issues that could facilitate your success. It might also somewhat reduce your need for using test shots as a crutch.

Perhaps you’d also be better served, latitude-wise, by considering Portra. Different color (less saturated) and different latitude (wider) than Ektar.

[agregov]

I also would recommend starting with Portra and shoot it at 1/2 box speed (eg. shoot Portra 400 at 200asa). Portra is difficult to blow out your highlights and you'll ensure you capture your shadow detail at 1/2 box speed. If you are going into the color darkroom to print color negs, I'd stay away from Ektar. It's a difficult film to color correct--it has a tricky magenta cast. If scanning negatives, it probably doesn't matter which film you use. I'd start with Portra 400 personally--you'll get faster exposures that way and stay away from reciprocity failure in sub 1 sec exposures while getting up to speed.

[Drew Wiley]

Ektar is just as easy to print in the darkroom as any other color neg film. Same starter settings. If there's a problem, don't blame the film, but failure to expose it correctly to begin with. And there is no magenta cast - that's probably an odd colorhead or mismatch paper issue, certainly not any characteristic of the film itself. Gosh knows I've sure enlarged a lot of it in every format up to 8x10 using three different kinds of enlargers. But Ektar if a fussier less forgiving bird to shoot than Portra films - that just comes with the territory of greater contrast and cleaner saturation.

[xkaes]

I have not found anything unusual about Ektar. I started with Ektar 25 in 35mm -- and ran the usual tests for my ISO and gear. In 4x5 I started with Agfacolor 100, 125, and 400 -- but have ADDED Ektar 100 -- I still have some Agfacolor 4x5. I have not noticed any difference. Maybe my temperature control method has something to do with this.

[agregov]

Yeah, my color heads are fine. I've seen color issues with Ektar on many color heads (Saunders and Omegas). Also, no issues with processing my film (Jobo CPP3). I have zero issues with Portra with the exact same workflow. Note, this is color darkroom printing. Scanning and color correcting there is likely not an issue, though I don't have experience there. "Cast" is probably not the right word to use regarding Ektar magenta behavior but its color makeup certainly leans heavier in the magenta direction, far more than with Portra films. I just taught a color darkroom workshop a few weeks ago and one of the students had some Ektar negs, same issue. He had a tough time color correcting it and it was all magenta he was fighting with. Anyway, that just my experience. The easiest way to know which film to shoot, is to buy both and make some prints from each.

[Drew Wiley]

I don't know what planet you're having this alleged issue on agregov. Never heard of a "magenta cast" issue with Ektar before. I have two pulsed halogen large format RGB additive colorheads, one 8x10, the other 5x7, as well as a more traditonal 8x10 Durst CMY colorhead - never a so-called magenta issue with any of them. And these are very serious enlargers in a completely different league from anything Saunders or Omega. By design, it is a more saturated and higher contrast film than the Portra series. Just as easy to correct or adjust in darkroom printing than any other color neg film, probably easier because the hues are cleaner. But I don't just buy such a film and make a quick comparison. I've shot Ektar and printed it for as long as its been on the market, in multiple formats. Did plenty of Portra prior to that, done all kind of color neg films, in fact.

My take : As usual, don't blame the film. It's quality control is superb. There is something off either in your exposures, equipment, chemistry, or workflow. But I've said all this twice already.

[xkaes]

I use lower-class Beseler 45 MXII and CB7 enlargers and have never had a problem. I started using EKTAR 25 in 35mm when it first came out -- for two reasons. I had been doing the Kodachrome 25/Cibachrome thing -- with great results -- but you know what happened with that!
I also made the switch to Ektar 25 because my main film was AGFAPAN 25 -- which made switching from B&W to COLOR a breeze.

Before EKTAR 100 in 4x5, I had been using AGFACOLOR 100 & 125, but when I made the move to EKTAR 100 4x5, I did not see any significant change in color -- or anything else.

I still miss the results from Kodachrome 25, but 100 in 4x5 is good enough!!!

[newt]

I bought the color film but haven't shot it yet. I bought ektar, not portra because when I shoot color, I am interested in saturation. Back in the 1990s and early 00s I shot ektachrome 64T and they were printed cibachrome. but with the takeover of digital the ciba "paper" (was it ilford then or just changing over?) was reformulated, optimized for digital printers, were they called Lambda ? I don't even remember, but the point is that the paper was no longer good for optical printing. Laumont wanted to scan my film, and print them digitally. I lost my interest because I was raised on analog, light and shadows and silver crystals and magic, things interacting thus forming new things. and back then digital was at only an emerging stage and it showed. Anyway I have the Ekatr and will experiment with that. Since I am shooting in blackwhite also, I can do that first, and have a strong guide of exposure. I dont shoot people so don't need to match tones pleasingly. I am interested in whatever spectral product the light and the objects and the lens and the film agree on. My lens is made of Topaz and Spinel, so is not a passive actor in the process.

[newt]

Back to the point of my original post. I have read the kodak spec sheet. But I asked because on the B&H website many of the reviews mentioned the great exposure latitude with this film. It seemed odd to me because back when I shot ektachrome64t it had pretty much no latitude at all. Processing -1 or more would shift the balance as well so exposures really had to be right on. But ektar is negative film, which I had been told, admittedly decades ago, has tremendous latitude, that's why I felt the need to ask people who actually use the stuff. For now, I am just going to make experiments, nothing really beats empirical data in the setting in question. I am going to bracket around what I think is right, leave everything set up so I can look at the results together with the source.

[xkaes]

Your supposition is correct. Compared to negative film, slide film has very little latitude. But it's higher contrast (and less "forgiveness" in exposure) makes it great for projection -- assuming you nail the exposure. Like many shutterbugs, I always shot slide film 1/3 f-stop/ ISO HIGHER -- so I shot Kodachrome 25 at ISO/ASA 32. For MOST negative film, I do the opposite and shot at around HALF the recommended ISO.

But in either case, it's best to run some tests for your ISO and development and taste.

I still remember my 35mm Kodachrome slides projected in a dark room on a 30 foot screen. It seemed like I was watching the real deal. Just amazing. Can't do that with a negative and print -- even a mural.

[Alan Klein]

Making slide shows for display on my 75" 4K TV is really nice. Very convenient. Just copy the slide show onto a memory card that gets plugged into the USB jack on the smart TV. The "back lighting" of TV rather than the reflection of projection, is quite impressive. It also looks great on a smaller monitor screen.

[sperdynamite]

I would just use proper filtration in camera and fix what you need in the scan. Print via pigment. If your subject is not moving I'd probably advise you shoot Ektachrome E100. It's a fabulous film stock. If not then Provia which is a little less expensive.

The color negative films are also very good. I like the slide film when scanning though because there is no issue with color conversion. That being said, Negative Lab Pro has really changed the game in that regard too.

[agregov]

I don't know what planet you're having this alleged issue on agregov.

Drew, you need to take a chill pill. There are differing opinions in the forum and most forum members are pretty polite in sharing observations even when they might disagree. I see you bully other members all the time and I think it's bad form. I stand by my observations with Ektar as they've been corroborated by other color printers I've worked with side by side in the darkroom who saw my results first hand. I'll keep your points in mind, there may be something, somewhere broken in my workflow. I respect your experience. But don't disrespect mine simply because I have a different experience than you may be able to understand.

Apologies to others in the thread for any derail.

[Drew Wiley]

It's not a chill pill. You made an unfair stereotype about a very high quality film - no, not totally idiosyncrasy free (no film is) - but where all the tech specs and dye curves match my own considerable experience with this, if one understands how to read into all that kind of data. Please try to have a sense of humor about this. I'm not trying to insult you! You're free to throw some barbs of you own if it helps. Won't bother me. Sorry if I offended you.

Otherwise, Ektar is capable of a cleaner overall hue palette than any other color neg film ever that I'm aware of. But that very fact makes it different from most of the CN pack, which are artificially skintone warm-balanced and lower in contrast. There are some tricks to it, and don't expect it to be as forgiving as Portra, for example.

Outdated paper itself might trend too magenta. And the cleaner steeper spectral peaks of Ektar film dyes might trigger a response to that which more common CN films with the gentler dye curve slopes don't.

[Drew Wiley]

Spydermite - have you EVER printed color neg film via pigment? That would be a formidable amount of work to do. (Hint - inkjet is NOT pigment printing). Think of Richard Kauffman and real pigment prints (tricolor carbro) from color negs. Inkjet inks are complex blends of pigments, lakes, and rather common photographic dyes. Terming them "pigment prints" is a common but basically deceptive second-hand marketing ruse, one implying that they're hypothetically more permanent than they really probably are. Time will tell. Mislabeling these doesn't affect me personally, but REAL pigment printers might not appreciate the misapplication.

Newt - Durst Lambda is just one of the major brands of RGB laser printing machines that could be used to print onto either Ciba or chromogenic sheet paper. Ciba is gone, but these kinds of machines are still widely in operation and create a sharper cleaner image than inkjet printers. They're very expensive, and currently output onto a variety of RA4 chromogenic products, including Fuji Supergloss, which resembles Ciba. I prefer to do optical enlarging. But big commercial labs need to be on a tight schedule, so doing the contrast and saturation tweaks via scanning and PS is better for them than the old and slow, but potentially more nuanced, method of film masking.

[agregov]

No worries Drew! Thanks for the response--appreciate that. Another way of describing my experience with Ektar is for every one point of movement in magenta, I might see an equivalent movement of 2-3 points in Portra films. I've made .5 pt changes in the color pack with Ektar and have seen bigger swings in color than I would expect. It makes the film harder to color correct in the. darkroom (for me at least). Perhaps that's an aftereffect of the extra saturation over Portra.

[newt]

Thank you all for the great insights into these films. All the color work I have done previously was on 4x5 ektachrome 64T, and many years ago. The prints I had made were all cibachrome. The color saturation was intensely gooey. There was also instant gratification in that I could just put the chromes on a lightbox and loupe them to see exactly what I had. That is really what i was looking for again. I think when I went to the B&H website I must have searched for ektachrome 64t and found it wasnt made any more so then filtered to color negative film. Now I have learned that there is still something like what I used the E100, though it is daylight balanced which I can correct with a filter on the lens. My first test of ektar is a little disappointing. I shot it first in tech pan and so have the bw neg that I like. I shot the equivalent exposure in ektar, and bracketed both sides. I got that back and scanned them. There is definitely a small and uneasy range of latitude, so exposure needs to be spot on, unless it can be compensated in the printing, which I do not want to get involved in. From what you all say about balancing color in the darkroom it seems to me like a lot of manipulation after the fact. With the cibachrome printer I was able to say I wanted the prints to match the chromes perfectly, no corrections to my, or their, subjective tastes or expectations. Obviously that is not the way color negative film works. The saturation in the ektar I shot is actually less than I was looking for. I like colors like Jolly Ranchers, or Charms Pops. The intense green of a 7-up bottle back when they were glass. I will open it in PS tonight and play around to see if I can get it to match what I remember of my view on the ground glass. It is weird, but there seems little more color in the ektar neg than the tech pan one. I think I will try the E100 also.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, the only way you can do that again is to take your chromes and invert them into RA4 printability either via a scan, or like me, learning how to make precise LF internegs from them. Simply choose Fujiflex Supergloss if you want that true polyester Ciba look, instead of chromogenic RC paper. ....At least if anyone offers it at the moment. I'm still waiting for a backorder. Another covid related distribution and availability headache at the moment.

But Cibachrome was highly idiosyncratic in terms of color reproduction. Nobody on earth had the ability to precisely replicate the look of your chromes. The whole idea was to come up with a stunning stand-in, or an esthetic home run, even if you had to bat left-handed in the lab. Fujiflex is a lot easier to control in that respect. No need for me to go into how I deal with contrast and saturation issues printing optically, if you're going to go the commercial laser printing route. In that case, it's just done via something like Photoshop or an analogous on-board software system.

The important thing to remember with Ektar is that you need to shoot it reasonably close to the prescribed Daylight color temperature of 5500K. If the lighting is significantly off, especially on the cool side, you need to use an appropriate warming filter. I always carry at least a pinkish 2B skylight filter for minor warming, a KR1.5 or 81A for blueish overcast, and often an 81C or KR3 for deep shade under intense blue open skies. If you don't do that, certain hues simply won't differentiate abd saturate well, and you risk a cyan imbalance in particular. And despite webbish "I can do anything in PS" mythology, it's very difficult or maybe even impossible to post-correct that kind of crossover error using software. Well, yeah, somebody might spend a week futzing around and come up with a patch; but it only takes a few seconds to do it right using a filter instead, right at the time of the shot. It's quite different in that respect than shooting chromes or portrait-style color neg films, which are more forgiving of lighting errors.

Also important - with either Ektar 100 or new Ektachrome 100, shoot at actual box speed of 100. Don't follow that old Pleistocene advice to overexpose color neg films, or your Ektar shots will look and smell like a decayed Mastodon.

There has been nothing equivalent to Ektachrome 64 in a long time. All the remaining chrome films including Ektachrome 100 have more contrast and saturation, are cleaner-hued, especially with regard to green reproduction, and are much finer grained. The overall blue dominant balance of old Ekta 64, along with its red contamination of green, could do marvelous things for certain gray-green or sage hued off greens quite difficult to achieve with present films, which greatly excel in terms of cleaner reds and clean "spring greens". But Ektar can come remarkably close in both categories IF you use it correctly filtered as I just described. It has more of a struggle differentiating similar hues of blue and cyan.

[Alan Klein]

Thank you all for the great insights into these films. All the color work I have done previously was on 4x5 ektachrome 64T, and many years ago. The prints I had made were all cibachrome. The color saturation was intensely gooey. There was also instant gratification in that I could just put the chromes on a lightbox and loupe them to see exactly what I had. That is really what i was looking for again. I think when I went to the B&H website I must have searched for ektachrome 64t and found it wasnt made any more so then filtered to color negative film. Now I have learned that there is still something like what I used the E100, though it is daylight balanced which I can correct with a filter on the lens. My first test of ektar is a little disappointing. I shot it first in tech pan and so have the bw neg that I like. I shot the equivalent exposure in ektar, and bracketed both sides. I got that back and scanned them. There is definitely a small and uneasy range of latitude, so exposure needs to be spot on, unless it can be compensated in the printing, which I do not want to get involved in. From what you all say about balancing color in the darkroom it seems to me like a lot of manipulation after the fact. With the cibachrome printer I was able to say I wanted the prints to match the chromes perfectly, no corrections to my, or their, subjective tastes or expectations. Obviously that is not the way color negative film works. The saturation in the ektar I shot is actually less than I was looking for. I like colors like Jolly Ranchers, or Charms Pops. The intense green of a 7-up bottle back when they were glass. I will open it in PS tonight and play around to see if I can get it to match what I remember of my view on the ground glass. It is weird, but there seems little more color in the ektar neg than the tech pan one. I think I will try the E100 also.

Newt, If you really like colors, Velvia 50 is still available through 2023 but you have to get it from Japan directly. It's expensive about $160 for twenty 4x5 sheets including shipping from Japan to the USA. Provia (20 sheets one box) is around $90 bought from B&H in NYC. Ektachrome around $120 (2 boxes of ten). Shipping free.

Here is a comparison of Provia 100F and Ektachrome E100 in 4x5. As you can see the greens and reds are more saturated with Ektachrome. Both shot at box speed 100. Of course, there was some editing in Lightroom so there could be slight differences in colors than shown. BUt you can see these pretty much in the actual chromes.

Provia on the left.

[Alan Klein]

PS: Does anyone know how to post larger photos than on my last post?

[xkaes]

Post on an external website that meets your desired size -- and provide a URL link.

[newt]

Thanks Drew, there's a lot of useful information. The good news is that I just found way in the back of my film drawer an unopened box of velvia 50! only 10 sheets, and it expired in '08 but it is something. I remember Jan Groover once told me about her method of baking her new film in the oven to get it the way she wanted it. I gave up color when digital printing started to replace optical printing. I wonder if people will even print at all soon, or just scan and make NFTs?!

[Drew Wiley]

Hmmm ... Never heard of baking color film before. I do have a little toaster oven just outside my darkroom for sake of drying print test strips, and do know that if I set the timer a bit too long, I get the most fabulous DMax imaginable!

[Drew Wiley]

agregov - back to your issue printing Ektar ... Something you last posted gave me a clue. The overall steepness of the dye curve with Ektar does mean that relatively minor adjustments on your colorhead setting will indeed have stronger effect than with a lower contrast color film like Portra (especially Portra 160). I have to be especially careful to dial in just a tiny amount of change on my older Durst CMK colorhead once I'm getting close to what I want. With my fancier RGB colorheads it is easier, since I have electronic feedback control within 1cc. But even 1 or 2 cc of filtration change can often make a noticeable difference with Ektar. It just comes with the territory; but the result is cleaner color reminiscent of slide films.