Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
The color response dye peaks and curves in any given film are engineered to operate in a specific way in balanced relation to one another at a specific color temperature. With Kodak, photographic daylight is 5500K, with Fuji it seems more like 5200K. Yes, unless one has a critical assignment where hues and the gray need to be rendered at correctly as possible, they are at perfect liberty to bend to rules to their own taste. Often a chrome will provide an appealing look in this manner. More often these days, I run into types who try to get away with the same thing using Ektar color neg film, it comes out looking like hell, and then they call Kodak stupid, even after they've spent a week beating the image to death in Photoshop. A simple correction filter at the time of the shot could have saved them all the fuss. And very few of those people ever learned to correctly work with an objective standard like the MacBeth Color Checker Chart to begin with.
So Bernice is completely correct with respect to what it takes to get chrome shots as color-accurate and predictable as possible. Personal esthetic decisions and preferences are a valid topic in their own right. When it comes to uncompromised hue accuracy and gray scale balance, few tasks are more demanding than making high-quality duplicates. Fuji's CDU series of duplicating sheets films was basically just tungsten-balanced Astia, and then when Astia 100F finally came out, it proved for me to be the best dupe film ever, with the additional important improvement of being on dimensionally stable polyester base instead of triacetate.
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