Best available 120 film for accurate and subtle colour

I need to get some 120 size film which will give me accurate colours, especially subtle variations of colour.

As background. I have used slide film for all my colour work for years. For these applications I originally used Kodachrome, then the Agfa line (RS -> RSX -> RSX II), finally the Rollei CR200. However CR200 from Maco is showing a yellow cast and it looks like they have not corrected this issue (they told me to use filters to get neutral colour!!). I guess I will have to go with colour negative film, but I have negligible experience with this.

Thank you.

choice

I loved Kodachrome but in no way did it render "accurate and subtle" color. It was garish and rather crude but very, very sharp. This leads me to wonder just what it is you are trying to achieve. Do you use a color temperature (light) meter? The professional photographers I have known who were very, very picky about the colors in their photos would not hesitate one second from using a filter or several, if it did the job.

Kodachrome was never the color of choice for me, especially for that which you are asking,

It has been said( but so have a lot of things) that Kodak Ektar might come closest but I suspect that you might just have to accept a different look from colour neg.

If you were a member you could look at the gallery and see if there is a common link between pics you like and the film used to shoot them.

Try several different films, get prints made and compare. None will be bad or waste-bin material but for a few pounds, dollars, euros you'll have in your hand the material for an informed decision.

pentaxuser

Kodachrome was a lot more subtle and accurate than velvia.
Normal portrait/wedding photographers back in the day shot negative film and depended on the printing lab to get the color consistent and right. A good lab that did portraits all the time could please picky photographers did quality work exposing/lighting the portraits.
Of the kodak choices, the Ektar 100 will be the most slidefilm like (with bigger range as you'd expect with a negative). The Portra will be the most subtle in handling variations. Results depend largely on the printing/scanning skills.

With colour neg film, colour can be adjusted at printing stage.

So, unlike slide film, choosing which film is not so critical.

For accurate and subtle color I immediately turn to Kodak Portra 160. If light is low I'd turn to Portra 400.

BrianShaw said:

For accurate and subtle color I immediately turn to Kodak Portra 160. If light is low I'd turn to Portra 400.

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+1. For subtle and accurate, Portra is primus inter pares; for vibrant to the point of dramatic, I would opt for Ektar.

Portra 400

frank said:

With colour neg film, colour can be adjusted at printing stage.

So, unlike slide film, choosing which film is not so critical.

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That's a conclusion I recently came to myself.

I've been shooting a lot of Portra and a lot of Ektar this year. With a hybrid workflow, I can saturate/desaturate either to look like the other pretty easily. I don't print (analog) color with them, but from what I gather, the same can be said for analog printing.

While chromes are WYSIWYG, with negative film, its different. Final output color is all about your downstream workflow.

omaha said:

That's a conclusion I recently came to myself.

I've been shooting a lot of Portra and a lot of Ektar this year. With a hybrid workflow, I can saturate/desaturate either to look like the other pretty easily. I don't print (analog) color with them, but from what I gather, the same can be said for analog printing.

While chromes are WYSIWYG, with negative film, its different. Final output color is all about your downstream workflow.

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It is very rare that I use colour but I normally carry a single coated lens and a multi coated lens the SC lens pastels vibrant transparency film, compared to a MC lens so my projections don't need 'processing' if it is a flat day Id use the MC lens, they are LTM lenses so fit on my canon P and Leica M, and they are cheaper together then a Leica lens by some margin.

Urmonas said:

I need to get some 120 size film which will give me accurate colours, especially subtle variations of colour.

As background. I have used slide film for all my colour work for years. For these applications I originally used Kodachrome, then the Agfa line (RS -> RSX -> RSX II), finally the Rollei CR200. However CR200 from Maco is showing a yellow cast and it looks like they have not corrected this issue (they told me to use filters to get neutral colour!!). I guess I will have to go with colour negative film, but I have negligible experience with this.

Thank you.

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Is this subtle enough? I don't understand your yellow cast. How is it being processed?



It's on AGFA/Rollei CR200 Pro 120 E6.

RR

Depends on what you are photographing, the subject, specific hues, and the lighting ratio you contend with. Most color neg films are balanced for skintones but might sacrifice the accuracy of other kinds of hues. Ektar can be tamed to a very accurate palette, but will generally be too saturated and contrasty for most people's idea of a portrait film, and taming it requires some explanatioon. The most accurate slide films were Astia 100F, Provia 64T, and in third place, Kodak E100G, all now discontinued, but perhaps available for sale somewhere. Older than that, not much chance of the film being any good. Kodachrome is extinct extinct, since even the developer is gone. But in short, there is no "best" color
film. It all depends.

Provia 400X -shoot it while you can

For accurate and subtle colour, I'm a fan of Fuji Pro 160NS. A few samples:

400H- Best color anywhere and very soft and beautiful IMO.

There's a difference between "soft" and "subtle". If the term subtle is defined as the ability to cleanly differentiate closely related hues, most
traditional color neg films would flunk pretty fast. They're engineered to render "pleasing skintones", and are rather hit and miss elsewhere.
Just depends what that elsewhere is. But the whole idea of doing everything with just one film is kinda naive. We can still settle on a favorite, however... cause we all slowly gravitate to seeing things the way the film does as we learn to master it. And once we've attained that summit
of craft or vision, or whatever, that particular film suddenly gets yanked off the market!

If perception of colour is a subjective, individual/personal experience, perhaps there really isn't such a thing as "accurate" colour. :confused:

When I shot art documentation work at a museum, I used Kodak Ektachrome EPP or EPN. The colors had to be neutral to render the art work accurately. Been such a long time that I don't even know if Kodak makes it anymore. But I would shoot a a Macbeth color checker to see if it's satisfactory. I didn't use it for my personal work. For that, I like Fuji RPT. I don't know if Fuji makes that film either.

Very true

frank said:

If perception of colour is a subjective, individual/personal experience, perhaps there really isn't such a thing as "accurate" colour. :confused:

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Yes. On top of that, the dyes in the film or paper, is probably different than color of your subject. It's just an approximation and the photographer will have to be the arbiter of what is "accurate". But testing the film and the photo lab will go a long way in accessing that. For me, I like colors that are not neutral nor accurate. That's the fun of color photography for me.

Thank you for all of the responses. I will try to address a range of the points raised.

Firstly Kodachrome. True it is not highly accurate colour, but at the time I switched I was very unhappy with the colour accuracy of the colour negative film D&P from a well regarded photo lab. Kodachrme was a BIG step forward. My tastes have probably changed since then. The local Kodak facility stopped processing Kodachrome 120 over 20 years ago. I was very happy with what Agfa RSXII was giving me, and Rollei CR200 after that. There have been reports of a yellow cast on CR200, and I had a thread on this just recently. The response from Maco suggested I should use filters to get neutral colour balance which I have never had to do in the past when shooting in daylight. It appears the film from Maco has degraded in some way so I am concerned that if I found the correct filter for one film, the next film may have a different cast. If I believed the cast was consistent, then I could compensate it. CR200 I have shot in the last year or so has show varying yellow cast. This is not a developing issue (Fuji film developed at the same time shows no cast). Hence my questions.

To clarify what I am trying to obtain from the film. Most of my shooting with this film will be outdoors in daylight. I want a neutral white when shooting in daylight. More importantly I need subtle colour shifts to be well captured on the film. I have 2 test objects which will clarify what I am looking for. One is a small white flower which has just a hint of purple. CR200 when not showing a yellow cast comes close, a little more purple than the real thing, but not bad. Fuji Provia shows the flower as lavender purple. The other test item is a persimmon fruit which at the right time of year has a bright orange colour with a "dusty" appearance (it looks like someone coated the fruit in dust). This is the killer test. Fuji Provia and Velvia completely fail this (show a highly saturated orange fruit). Astia was closer but still poor. Agfa RSX and RSXII showed this clearly, it looks close to the dusty appearance of the fruit. In terms of colour accuracy, I want something close to the original colour. This means no strange colour shifts or over saturated effects. I am happy with some small variation, but the overall impression (casual observer) should be "it is the same colour". Obviously when shooting in other than full daylight, I will need to use compensating filters.

I realise I will need to test a few films, but it would be good if I could narrow down to save unnecessary testing.

Thank you

Just because people are really bad at evaluating colour doesn't mean we can't have accurate colour. We have good quantifiable means of measuring hue and density and all those things, and we can readily determine what is an "accurate" representation.

Of the currently available films, Portra 160 is the most accurate, i.e. has the smallest average and peak delta-E (colour error) values. It's nearly as accurate as shooting digital.

While negatives are not the final image, and you can adjust hue & density during printing, you cannot readily adjust contrast or saturation unless you are doing a hybrid workflow. Also, any colour errors introduced by the film (e.g. spectral sensitisers with peaks in the wrong places), CANNOT ever be corrected in post-processing - you can't recover information once it is lost. To make an extreme analogy, you can't recover a colour image from a single B&W negative, because the negative does not contain any hue information.

So film choice matters. It matters a lot. If you want the ultimate accuracy, shoot Portra 160 and if you want to do it in the dark, shoot Portra 400. If you shoot Ektar and wet-print it, you're going to have the same problem as if you'd shot your portraits on RVP50: way too much contrast and saturation. If you can get Fuji 160NS / Pro160S, then it's very nearly as good as Portra and has the typical Fuji emphasis to greens and purples.

While chromes are pretty, they are fundamentally less accurate because they cannot implement a masking layer to address sensitiser shortcomings, like negatives do. As you point out, negatives in the age of Kodachrome were pretty bad but technologically they have now far surpassed all chromes for colour accuracy.

With regard to your persimmon, my guess is that you're running up against the exposure latitude of those higher-contrast chromes, i.e. the red channel was fully-exposed by the persimmon, therefore it is not possible to hold any further red detail in that area and the fuzz disappears. Negatives don't really suffer from that problem because they have plenty of overexposure latitude.

Looks like Portra gets the most recommendations. I looked for the Fuji 160 NS, but not sure what the status of that film is. B&H, Adorama, and Freestyle do not stock it, and it is not on the Fuji US website. It is on the Fuji Japan website, and is available in Japan. It is also on the Fuji Europe website and available from suppliers in Germany and UK. A quick search on the web found some discussion on its discontinuance, but no solid information in the quick search that I did. I had hoped to compare Portra 160 and Fuji 160NS, but may have to compare the 400 speed versions depending on the staus of 160NS. Does anyone have confirmed information of the staus of Fuji 160 NS?

frank said:

If perception of colour is a subjective, individual/personal experience, perhaps there really isn't such a thing as "accurate" colour. :confused:

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An interesting point. My right eye always has rendered just slightly magenta compared to my left. It is easy to notice indoors under artificial light, especially incandescent. Outdoors it's hard to see, except maybe a little bit at sunrise/sunset or on overcast days.
I think of my left as the more neutral. It's definitely colder. A blank white paper held in front of me will look to my left eye pure white or a little bit bluish, while to my right it will have a little bit of a magenta cast.
I guess I just wasn't calibrated properly. Sometimes I get the feeling I was built on the Friday before a long holiday, or the first day back after.

Astia was well known and loved by many for its accurate color and contrast, and was widely regarded as the most accurate. I think that's all it is-- a matter of more or less accurate compared to other films.

Provia 400X -shoot it while you can

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Yes, my recommendation too! If you want to stay with slide film, this is the one to use, but it is already discontinued. Better buy soon since prices are already going up...