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/c...mparison-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...lm-comparison/

Pt 2 - Pine Cones and Polarised blue sky

http://www.landscapegb.com/2011/02/c...arison-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