edgar_njari

well negative film by its nature has less contrast, but there are some colorfull films.

In 120 the Kodak UC series.

The new Portra VC series is also supose to be updated with more saturation this year (but probably still less than UC)

In my opinion 160VC (the current version) is quite contrasty for such a type of film.

Roger

I was actually more aiming my comment at MF story, where a lot of people use flatbeds, and where real scanners cost a fortune.

I would agree with you that for 35mm , with some skill one can get professional quality scans at a relativley small price.

Though I still wouldn't burn my negs and slides after a 4000dpi scan on FS4000.

Roger. Yes you can do miracles with some know-how, but you can't do anything to fake dynamic range, color fidelity, resolution, noise etc. of the CCD in your scanner.

Nobody said you can't get good scans from a cheap Minolta, but you can still get better from an Imacon or Coolscan 9000

Using state of the art pro processing and scanning, Portra NC shows its true advantage: subtle but precise and sophisticated color.

It's just not an amateur film. It really does nothing spectacular on cheap minilab prints.

I just love it when someone buys a roll of Portra 160NC, drops it off in a minilab, and then says: gee, its such a crappy pale film, don't know why anyone would want to use it.

Try it with a drum scanner or high end CCD scanner, and a crew that knows its stuff, and see all the subtle bur rich colors you otherwise lose in crappy minilab or cheap home scanning.

Fall for me is all about subtlety, soft earth tones, reds etc.

So I'd go for negative film.

Portra 400VC (but only in 645-and-up formats) or 160NC

For slide films, I'd take Astia

The reason why it looks like a painting is because this technique does to the tones what a painter usually does when painting:

A painting usually has flatened out color areas boardered by higher contrast transitions. It's not the same as when you increase contrast to a photo because you still have those photo gradations.

The trick to make a photo look more like your typical painted mixeillustration is to increase local contrast between surfaces, and flatten out single color surfaces. In other words reduce contrast on evenly lit areas, while increasing it on transitional areas.

That's exactly what most painters do, due to the limitations of the medium itself. Paintings often have jumpy gradations, which in combination with usually high saturation, makes them look so eye catching in the first place compared to a regular photo.

If you are really an expert, it can even be done with carefull and complex lighting

You have to understand that not everyone finds the same things pretty.

Some people find soft light glamour portraits ugly, some people find colorfull landscapes ugly etc.

HDR with some large radius oversharpening (or masking whatever you want to call it), probobly done by merging software, thus the painterly contrasts between surfaces.

Ignoring the HDR part for a second, you can get that effect with regular images using manual unsharp/contrast masking with layers

The creamy quality of portra films and pretty much any other film, comes from a pretty large network of qualities of those materials that can't be boiled down to a simple photoshop plugin.

Of course, there are subjects in photography which can't even reveal the differences, unless you were shown a side by side comparisson.

Some kinds of pictures scream film or digital, while others are a challenge for even hardcore film fans to tell which is which.

So what I think is, for those subjects where the medium reveals itself most, use the genuine medium you want to use.

For subjects where the medium is not so obvious, use digital and tweak it in photoshop.

But really, most people that will tell you they have a quick way or a plugin to make ANY digital image look like film, probably have less visual sensitivity than you do, and compleatly misunderstand the problem, so ignore them.

I'm not placing any blame here, but some people can't tell a really realistic oil painting from a photograph and vice versa.

Seems I've been sleeping for a while.

I visited Kodak site today and was quite suprized to see that they updated all

the new Portra films, with tagslines such as "Film is our heritage.." "We've

said that we will support...film..." etc.

It seems Kodak has not abandoned film, and has somewhat altered its strategy,

from a rapid film-murder policy to a

lets-put-film-in-a-retirement-home-films-and-let-it-die-on-its-own kind of policy.

The most important thing is they have realised that 160VC has a little too much

contrast and a little less color than "vivid color" would demand.

They say they have lowered the contrast and increased saturation.

I've been shooting slides for a long time now, because I felt I was getting

finer grain and solid colors from Ektachrome films, but If this works now, I

might start using some negative film again.

So anyone tried the new Portra films?

There are two things that I'm specially interested in:

1.Does portra NC still look the same (only with finer grain)

2. How does VC look like now?

Any examples? (as much as I strongly believe in uselessness of consumer on-line

examples scanned on crappy scanners, I can't help but to crave for some photos)

thanks

Ok, so 64 is too slow, 160T and 320T is probably too grainy for you, you are using available light..

the options that are left are, use a filter on the lens with any film, use a digital camera or shoot neg and correct later

the methods mentioned above are:

-shoot T slide film

-shoot any kind of D film with geled lights

-shoot any kind of D film with a filter on the lens

-shoot D negative and correct in post

and you say you don't use any of these techniques, well I don't think anything is left (for film photography that is), so what DO you do?

First of all, what do you mean by indoors. Are you just planing to shoot with available light, or use tungsten lighting.

If you are using your own light, the best option of all I think is to gel the lights.

That way you can use a wide wariety of daylight films and don't have to shoot through anything other than your lens.

Anything you put in front of your glass is just another layer of stuff that light has to penetrate loosing accutance.

Like Dan said, if are shooting slides, you can also use tungsten film.

Both Ektachrome 64T and Fujichrome 64T are great films. Kodak is a little older now, but still a lot younger than daylight Ektachrome 64.

I think Ektachrome 64T looks creamy, smooth and colorful under tungsten light (love its reds). But a lot of people prefer Fuji because its a more high-tech film, specially the latest version.

For negs, if you overexpose it a bit (to fill the shadows with some more blue and cyan) to keep them neutral) you can even get away with no filters of any kind as long as you correct it to neutral.

With digital printing, you always have to correct the color balance anyway.

Though if you are fishing for extreme latitude and high-end results. You might have a compromise in neutrality of shadows.

Do what right? Dreamy look? I don't know how you dream, we all probably dream differently.

I don't dream with blown out highlights. I dream more like something out of Gregory Crewdsons collection.

If this is how you see dreams, then you nailed it

Felix, what kind of argument is to say that film has more contrast?

Contrast is one of the basic properties of any image, and can be easily adjusted with one little slider in photoshop. Or curves or anything.

It's like saying one TV in the store is better than the other one because the first one is turned on a better channel while on display

I think you may have expressed yourself wrongly, or something

"Anyone still shooting slide film?"

me, among other people, while I like the smooth look of negatives, I prefer having an "original" in my hands. I don't trust print services (unless its manual optical or done from my own files), and I can't really affoard professional scans of every frame I shoot just to see the picture in its full glory, so the only choice I have for seeing every picture I shoot in its original quality is shooting slides.

And I can still scan and print from them.

Though I wish there was a slide film out there with latitude of negative film (like Portra NC)

"Is there any advantage to shooting slides and then scanning it to digital as required?"

no, go shoot digital

Hi

I've seen that in the past, before the advent of digital image processing, there

were ways to increase color saturation in much the same way photoshop would

increase it

For example, it was done in preprint probably using some kind of a printing

technique. Those old hyper saturated postcards from 70's are one example.

I was trying to figure out what would be the analog way of doing that.

The best thing that I came up with is having BW 3 color separations, then

printing each one to color print or film but with substracting the other two.

For example exposing one layer to the targed, then also exposing the inverse of

the other two. Which would in fact exagerate colors for that layer (say red),

then doing the same with other two layers, and all colors would be more saturated.

Is this how it was done?

If you are satisfied with this, why did you shoot Kodachrome in the first place?

I mean, come on, look at those examples on the site.

There is a way to have your cake and eat it too...

Obviously high latitude means less density change per one stop of light, which leads to low contrast.

BUT

We mostly percieve contrast by judging midtone contrast. The beauty of a print from a negative is in the fact that you can capture a large range and still have percieved contrast. It's because of the S shaped curve.

Having an S shaped curve means that your shadows and highlights are compressed.

In other words, you take a couple of stops in the overexposed part and squese them into your highlights part of the print, so what you get is low contrast in highlights meaning a lot of the range is compressed there. Same happens with shadows. While the midtones can have any contrast you desire.

When you scan negative, you shouldn't clip the highlights and shadows, this is a linear way of increasing contrast. The result will be like any slide film scan. Instead you should only increase the contrast of the midtones. The result is, you are using the entire range from the negative, and at the same time you have a punchy contrast for visual impact.