All LF Colour Films compared

[timparkin]

I've been working on a series of comparison of all of the different colour films available for large format (available = that I could get hold of).

This time I've included the new Portra 160 and 400 and the shot was of a sunset over a castle in Northern England.

Overall summary - Portra 160 is basically Portra 160VC with a bit nicer grain for scanning and a slightly nice colour balance (less colour crossover from what I can tell). Portra 400 is equivalent to 400NC but with a little more colour but also with an extra couple of stops in the shadows (19 stops of dynamic range from my tests).

The other conclusion is that (it looks like) Ektar has some crazy colour crossovers going on! Check out the Ektar vs Ektar grad - a straight neutral density filter shouldn't change colour that much.

I've also been scanning neg film at 6micron aperture and doing noise reduction with Imagenomic's noiseware. I think this is giving better results for bigger files but I'm still not totally sure if it's better in general (especially for shadow noise).

http://www.landscapegb.com/2011/06/colour-film-comparison-pt-3/

The previous installations may not have had as 'refined' negative conversions.. (I was using colorneg which I'm not convinced by yet) but here they are for reference

Pt 1 - Bluebells and dappled light

http://www.landscapegb.com/2010/12/a-colour-film-comparison/

Pt 2 - Pine Cones and Polarised blue sky

http://www.landscapegb.com/2011/02/colour-film-comparison-pt-two/

If you have any suggestions for how to refine these tests or make different comparisons or just want to suggest different shooting conditions - please let me know..

Tim

[BetterSense]

Cool test; very comprehensive for those that scan.

My first impression: why do the negatives look like crap compared to the chromes? Is there a way to bridge the gap digitally?

[engl]

I'm very grateful for these comparisons. Film choice is rather limited around here, film developing cost is sky high, not to mention drum scanning cost. You help me get an idea what films might be good candidates for what I want to do, although eventually I'd like to try them all.

Porta 400 looks as amazing as I've experienced it to be in 120 format, and yupp, Ektar is nuts (and I like it).

[engl]

Cool test; very comprehensive for those that scan.

My first impression: why do the negatives look like crap compared to the chromes? Is there a way to bridge the gap digitally?

Look under the section "Castle (colour match)" to see the result of matching the grey point between negatives and chromes. Much more could be done by adjusting individual colors, I'm sure.

Incidentally, right about every slide vs. negative comparison I've seen has shown negative to look pretty crap for landscape (which I don't shoot myself). I've read about those on here on the forums boasting about making negative film look like exactly like slides, but I wonder how many could take say a color negative RAW scan and turn it into what Velvia would have looked like (without access to a Velvia reference frame, of course).

[Drew Wiley]

There are already several threads on this in the past few months (one of them long and contentious). But to put it succinctly, Ektar has no crossover problems if you
properly expose and print it. It's a very accurate film, but more finely tuned and more saturated than traditional color neg films. You can believer whoever or whatever you
want about this; but the hues in my C prints from Ektar look very clean and crisp, and do indeed resemble what one would expect from printing a chrome. But Ektar isn't very
forgiving if you want to cut corners or wing it.

[timparkin]

Cool test; very comprehensive for those that scan.

My first impression: why do the negatives look like crap compared to the chromes? Is there a way to bridge the gap digitally?

Well I think they only look crap if you love chromes :-) Really though, negatives have so much dynamic range that they naturally look different. Some people much prefer that look (it can be a lot more natural) for instance most 'fine art' landscape photographers (Struth, Burtynski, etc).

You can use the results as a final product or you can treat them as a 'negative' and post process them.

Chromes have very little dynamic range and strong dye couplers which ensure strong primary colours. They are difficult to get natural looking though (the interpretation of chromes provide a boosted reality that is very engaging - possibly too engaging, depending on opinion).

Anyway - horses for courses - this particular shot suits transparency film I think.. maybe :-)

[timparkin]

There are already several threads on this in the past few months (one of them long and contentious). But to put it succinctly, Ektar has no crossover problems if you
properly expose and print it. It's a very accurate film, but more finely tuned and more saturated than traditional color neg films. You can believer whoever or whatever you
want about this; but the hues in my C prints from Ektar look very clean and crisp, and do indeed resemble what one would expect from printing a chrome. But Ektar isn't very
forgiving if you want to cut corners or wing it.

So are you saying that ektar will get the same colour correct all the way from underexposing to overexposing?

And they do this on the same paper as you can print Portra on?

So you can take a shot and underexpose it by a couple of stops and take the next frame and overexpose it be 3 stops and the colours will be consistent between the two pictures?

If so I'm not sure I can explain the results I get. The scans were made on the same machine and colours stayed fairly consistent on a film like Portra but with Ektar the colours were definitely shifting depending on level of exposure. Also, the deep shadows on Ektar drop away dramatically to very cool blue colours whereas Portra shadows are fairly neutral.

Tim

[Drew Wiley]

What I am saying is that you need to CORRECTLY expose Ektar. Preferably don't overexpose it, but definitely do not underexpose it. Expose it with the same careful metering as shooting a chrome. Use light balancing filters if needed (outdoors, typically 81A, 81B, or 81C to correct for blue balance in the shadows). I don't want to get into the "why" of this here because some folks don't understand the argument and think they can just wing it in Photoshop afterwards. Not the case. You need to get of on the right foot in the first place and correctly expose the film if you want reliable
results. It is engineered quite different from old-school color neg films, and is more finicky than Portra films too, but also capable of cleaner more chrome-like results if properly used. I print optically, so have a different set of protocols than someone digitally printing, so won't comment on the scanning or digital output path myself.
But I use the same paper (CAII) being used by high-end laser digital printing devices.

[Drew Wiley]

Oh yes, should add ... I print Portra and Ektar on the same paper, though with potentially different contrast corrections. Ektar is basically like Portra 160VC on steroids. The batch to batch quality control on these newer films has been pretty amazing, and color balance per se on a standardized neg, I hardly need to change the
color balance settings at all going from a Portra to Ektar midpoint when enlarging.
After that, it's all fine-tuning based upon the specific subject.

[timparkin]

What I am saying is that you need to CORRECTLY expose Ektar. Preferably don't overexpose it, but definitely do not underexpose it. Expose it with the same careful metering as shooting a chrome. Use light balancing filters if needed (outdoors, typically 81A, 81B, or 81C to correct for blue balance in the shadows). I don't want to get into the "why" of this here because some folks don't understand the argument and think they can just wing it in Photoshop afterwards. Not the case. You need to get of on the right foot in the first place and correctly expose the film if you want reliable
results. It is engineered quite different from old-school color neg films, and is more finicky than Portra films too, but also capable of cleaner more chrome-like results if properly used.

I have no doubt it can produce great results (I have taken some images on Ektar I really like) however, colours *do* change as you over and underexpose. If that isn't a colour crossover then I've got my definitions wrong.

I have a 35mm film strip with the same colour checker charts on it (a colorchecker, and an IT8 target plus a couple of kodak test photos) and have bracketed Ektar -8 stops and +18 stops. Would you expect the colours to be consistent for all the frames that show colour?

I'm of the opinion that we'll see a strong shift in colour (compared with Portra or Pro160S) as you go from under to overexposure. This exhibits itself most strongly in things like sunsets where you have extreme over exposure in the sky.

What do you think?

Tim

[Drew Wiley]

Yes, that is crossover, and specifically because, with either over or under-exposure, you have placed the values on the wrong part of the dye curves, which are not either symmetrical or matched. To some extent this will happen with Portra films too, but the effect is less exaggerated because these films are balanced to achieve pleasing skin tones at the partial expense of purer hues. But if you have an imbalance in blue, even correct exposure will not salvage it. You need to add a warming filter and correctly compensate the exposure for it. Without such filters, I always expose Ektar at box speed (ASA 100) and have found it to be very predictable under a wide range of situations. An 81A filter will need about a third stop of compensation, and 81B about
half a stop, and an 81C about two-thirds.

[engl]

Drew, are you saying then that the Ektar shot here is underexposed? Since the shadows have turned blue, while the mids are very close to other negative films (in other words, a warming filter would result in matching shadows and a much warmer scene overall).

[Drew Wiley]

Possibly. Under a blue sky, shadows are truly blue. But if that inflects other parts of the scene, you need to balance for it. Any studio photographer learned to practice all
these basics and kept a color temp meter handy. Outdoor photographers tend to wing it. I don't travel with a color temp meter because I am pretty familiar with different types of lighting and how to compensate for them. But when you are establishing a master printing negative from a Macbeath chart and gray scale, I strongly recommend
using a color temp meter and balanced light conditions. Every film has certain idiosyncrasies or a signature which we can learn to juggle creatively. Nothing is a perfect reproduction of nature. But Ektar can be downright ornery if you don't practice
the basics: Meter and exposure exactly / color balance if needed. I frequently see
shots people have made on Ektar and tweaked in PS; they think the effect is great
because they get saturation missing from other neg films. But what I see is a helluva
lot of cross-contamination due to failure to understand how this film works, and the
shots still look dirty to me. The relationship between the hues will be a lot cleaner and purer if you practice a few simple rules. Printing it is a different story, and here some contrast corrections are likely to be necessary.

[engl]

Then I assume Ektar is only accurate (free from hue shifts depending on exposure) as long as the scene has no deep shadows, or the shadows are thrown away in printing/processing.

It would not matter if you have absolutely perfect exposure and filtration for your main subject, there might still deep shadows somewhere in the scene which would turn blue.

[timparkin]

Then I assume Ektar is only accurate (free from hue shifts depending on exposure) as long as the scene has no deep shadows, or the shadows are thrown away in printing/processing.

It would not matter if you have absolutely perfect exposure and filtration for your main subject, there might still deep shadows somewhere in the scene which would turn blue.

I think I may understand it as "As long as you know what Ektar is going to do, you'll be OK with it". Obviously if you know it's going to go blue/purple at -4 stops then you make sure you have no critical colour there, etc..

Anyway - I did a preliminary scan of my Ektar tests.

http://static.timparkin.co.uk/static/tmp/demo-scans-ektar-lfpinfo.jpg

What I've done is try to compensate for reduced exposure by applying a contrast correction. However, the coloured bar at the bottom is the IT8 profile grayscale from the correctly exposed shot (taken at 18% grey off of the IT8 background) and extracted the colours from it by neutralising the contrast (boosting shadows and pulling down highlights) and then increasing the saturation to see what colours we really have. This correlates well with the overall changes we see from frame to frame..

Tim

[Drew Wiley]

Best to get on first base first with a truly balanced neg test chart. And most scenes
can be corrected for color temp without things going wild. Once in awhile it can get
interesting however, especially if you push the contrast significantly for printing. An
example of this might be where you fail to use a center filter for a wide angle lens and
the falloff produces not only a density effect, but an actual warm/cold hue shift. I produced something like this the other day by heavily masking a little 6x7 Ektar
neg so it would print a deep blue sky high contrast even in 20x24. An attractive experiment but not wholly realistic: the center of the field was almost turquoise, the
extreme corners inflected with violet. Chromes aren't perfect either. You pick your
battle. For skin tones you've got the muddier Portra 160, although I learned to do
beautiful portraits with chrome film and Cibachrome, supposedly a no-no. Cole Weston
rendered wonderful skin tones on Cibachrome (well, a bit too much skin perhaps).
So it's all about learning how to tame a specific medium, or how to deliberately fail to tame it. Just don't expect Ektar to behave like the less contrasty Portras.

[timparkin]

Best to get on first base first with a truly balanced neg test chart. And most scenes
can be corrected for color temp without things going wild. Once in awhile it can get
interesting however, especially if you push the contrast significantly for printing. An
example of this might be where you fail to use a center filter for a wide angle lens and
the falloff produces not only a density effect, but an actual warm/cold hue shift. I produced something like this the other day by heavily masking a little 6x7 Ektar
neg so it would print a deep blue sky high contrast even in 20x24. An attractive experiment but not wholly realistic: the center of the field was almost turquoise, the
extreme corners inflected with violet. Chromes aren't perfect either. You pick your
battle. For skin tones you've got the muddier Portra 160, although I learned to do
beautiful portraits with chrome film and Cibachrome, supposedly a no-no. Cole Weston
rendered wonderful skin tones on Cibachrome (well, a bit too much skin perhaps).
So it's all about learning how to tame a specific medium, or how to deliberately fail to tame it. Just don't expect Ektar to behave like the less contrasty Portras.

Completely agree..

I don't mean to flog a dead horse but are you saying that Ektar does have a colour crossover problem but that you need to know it's there and work with it rather than expecting perfect colour? Your centre filter example suggests just this - a consistent colour in real life rendered as slightly different colours because of different exposure levels caused by the centre filter..

Knowing that the colour crossover is there could help a lot of people neutralise it when post processing their ektar scans (e.g. by applying an S shape curve the blue channel which should help things a bit - possibly a little bit of a increase in green in the shadows too).

My thoughts looking at how Ektar is behaving here is to treat it more like a chrome film in terms of total dynamic range but rate it at 50 instead (which would make the chrome like -3 / +2 equivalent to a -2 / +3 which would make sure most shadows don't end up in the blues.. perhaps rate it at 60ish instead but definitely don't underexpose it whatever you do..

As for very bright highlights, I would grad where possible (a soft grad has worked well on my exposures, using one stop less than you would if you were using slide film i.e. typically a 1 stop unless you've got a strong sunset in which case a 2 stop.

My next test would be to get my strip of film printed to RA4 to see if it still exhibits the effect (I would imagine it does - perhaps to a lesser extent - however I would also expect the shadows and highlights to block up quicker than the way I can post process my scan).

Appreciate the conversation by the way - no meaning to be 'argumentative'

Tim

[Drew Wiley]

Tim - there's an analogous thread where the practical ASA of Portra 160 is discussed.
Some people correct the blue problem with this film simply by rating the film lower so
the blue-sensitive layer gets sufficient exposure, and then post-exposure balancing the
neg in PS. While this strategy tends to work, it will result in something else in the mix
becoming compromised, with Ektar exaggerating this issue even more than Portra. I've done some hard testing and have come to the conclusion that light balancing via filtration at the time of shooting will result in a more versatile or workable pallette than simply overexposing and attempting to fix it later. Outdoors, I seem to only need a few
warming filters along. Of course, you might choose to break the rules on purpose, as
we all do once in awhile for either fun or creativity. But if sure helps to know where first base is, just in case.

[Drew Wiley]

Slightly different issue you brought up - I wouldn't worry too my about color shifts within the dynamic range of the film. If you go past that, either the highlts will simply
be blown out, or the shadows will dump. You won't get a color shift from high to low if
the neg is correctly exposed per ASA100. That kind of problem is more likely to arise when you get two completely different kinds of lighting in the same scene. But even chromes have difficulty correcting for that kind of thing, and have less range to boot.
But again, how can you efficiently break the rules unless you know the rules in the first
place?

[Drew Wiley]

Third point - I was deliberatey pushing the envelope when I induced a crossover with
that 6x7 neg. Under ordinary circumstances it could have been easily controlled. The
idea is to correctly expose the neg so that, in your case, about all you need to do is
correct the contrast and maybe a tad of color balance in PS for printing. You shouldn't
have to do much curve restructuring with a properly exposed neg, unless of course,
you wanted to for creative reasons. What I tend to see a lot of are improperly exposed
Ektar shots which would be a big headache to correct because they're so far off from
centerpoint to begin with. Overall, however, LF makes life a lot easier, both scanning and optically printing the traditional way. One of these days I'll get around to printing some 35mm Ektar, but I've got too many good 4x5's and 8x10's to work through first.

[engl]

Thanks for the replies, I'm really just trying to understand Ektar better. I shoot urban scenes at night, which means most shots are going to have several different types of light sources, all with different temperature, tint and intensity. Even shot on the widest dynamic range negative film, there will be pitch black areas as well as blown highlights, so film behavior outside the "comfort zone" of the film matters. Oh, and there is color shifts caused by reciprocity failure as well. Center filters are preferably avoided, as 2 stops loss would turn a 5 minute exposure into 40-60 minutes taking reciprocity failure into consideration. The good light lasts 10-20 minutes.

In short, its demanding for film, but I recently shot some of this type of photography on Ektar 100 and I'm now looking forward to getting back the negs. I aimed for rather high exposure and have been hoping for fairly saturated but unshifted mids, somewhat less highs than I get with Pro160S (which I'd expose lower), and shadows that go blue and cyan which fits the urban scenes I used it for.

But I guess it might also look crap.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, you're certainly courageous. I'd be too chicken to try Ektar at night, though
sooner or later I will. With Vericolor L long gone, and Fuji LF neg film also becoming
scarce, I wonder what the options are for mixed lighting? Kirk would probably know.

[Tim Gray]

Wow, that's a great resource. Thanks for publishing a test like that.

[atlcruiser]

This is an amazing body of work....thanks!

[BennehBoy]

@engl, probably off topic, but have you tried using tungsten slide films?

[ramon]

My first impression: why do the negatives look like crap compared to the chromes?

Part 3 slides looks better due to sunset light change.

First photographs (slides) have a glow effect on red flowers that later photographs (negatives) do not have.

My vote:

Part I : FUJI PRO 160S (best shadow detail and color).
Part II : Velvia 50/100 (best blue sky and stronger green and red)
Part III: First slides (due to light effect on foreground flowers, not film differences).

What would be the result in part III if negatives was shoted earlier than slide film?

I am the only one who prefers the great shadow detail and color of FUJI PRO 160S?

[ramon]

Tim, I forgot to say THANKS for this great work!