Ektar 100 too yellow in golden light

ericdan said:

Only have this right now. Would have to look in my archive for more.
https://flic.kr/p/zrva6X


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I have had similar shots like that but they are not just Ektar 100. I got that from many commonly used negatives including Ektar 100, Kodak Portra VC or NC, Konica Minolta and some Fuji films as well. In my opinion it is color crossover fault caused by processing error. I process my own films and make mistakes from time to time. The kind of color crossover fault is familiar to me. When I did get perfect processing my scanner usually will produce near perfect scan without any correction needed regardless what negative films I scan. It would be very difficult to make any correction without causing other colors to go wrong when I had processing issues to begin with. The color cast of your image looks just like mine that had a processing fault.

One of the reasons I like shooting positive film like Velvia, is that you get what you get. One look at the developed film, and you know if the colors and exposure are right. With Ektar and other negative film, I never know especially when I scan them. You might consider starting with a contact sheet. That might help.

Alan Klein said:

One of the reasons I like shooting positive film like Velvia, is that you get what you get. One look at the developed film, and you know if the colors and exposure are right. With Ektar and other negative film, I never know especially when I scan them. You might consider starting with a contact sheet. That might help.

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I think that one of the hardest concepts for people to really "get" is that with negatives, the camera exposure doesn't have a hard and direct tie to what prints. Fixing it in post is required, not optional.

A negative isn't a finished work, as a slide typically is. With negative film there are lots of possible "correct camera exposures" and the film curve has to dance with the paper curve with the help of the person printing.

With slides once the film is exposed it is done. With negatives, the fun begins.

markbarendt said:

I think that one of the hardest concepts for people to really "get" is that with negatives, the camera exposure doesn't have a hard and direct tie to what prints. Fixing it in post is required, not optional.

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I agree with this statement almost completely. But I would like to add something I learned (or discovered) last year.

With traditional wet optical printing yes there is a lot of "fun" (or pain) in terms of post processing. With negative scanning it was for a long time for me an equally difficult if not painful process too. However, after many years of hard learning, debugging and experimenting I finally concluded that the pain or difficulty associated with negative scanning was largely because of processing error of the film. I concluded that C-41 processing may look simple but it is really not trivial to get it done right.

I found that I have had too many processing faults that resulted in negatives that were very difficult to scan to achieve natural satisfactory color balance. For many years I wasn't even aware that my negatives were faulty. They were just difficult to scan to get the colors right. I finally realized the root causes of my processing errors and corrected them last year. I was extremely excited to discover that if the negatives are correctly processed the scanner can do a very good job in getting the colors right automatically. I found that regardless the films were Kodak VC, NC (160 and 400), Konica KN400, Fuji NPS160 or very old Kodak PRN100 and a few others that I experimented with once correctly processed they were all scan easily, painlessly and with almost no need to adjust colors. I still make a very small adjustment for optimization but it is extremely simple and fun to do.

The OP's picture is very similar to some of my pictures from my faulty negatives. The colors are just about impossible to balance. So what went wrong in my own film processing? There were mainly two causes. One was over use of the C-41 developer. Trying to develop too many rolls is a very common and very hard to correct concept about C-41 developer. With reuse of the developer over and over the negatives will become harder and harder to balance colors.

The 2nd fault of my processing was related to development temperature. My processor is a Jobo ATL-2300 automatic roller transport processor. Whenever I developed multiple rolls of negatives, especially 220 rolls, I wasn't aware that the prewarm of the drum and the films inside, no matter how long I set the prewarm time, was always insufficient. When the developer was poured into the drum the temperature would be instantly lowered. It was probably off quite a few degrees from the required 100 degree F which of course resulted in a faulty processing. I finally adopted a wet prewarm step into my ATL2300, based on a hint from PE, and it cured all my processing fault of this cause.

The point is if the negatives are correctly processed then scanned the post processing can be significantly easier. Well, to get it printed then of course is another matter.

If this was a processing error then I would expect the entire roll to be bad.


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markbarendt said:

I think that one of the hardest concepts for people to really "get" is that with negatives, the camera exposure doesn't have a hard and direct tie to what prints. Fixing it in post is required, not optional.

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I couldn't disagree more. More time has been spent on the zone system to do just that. The c41 process intent is to standardise exposure, film and chemistry. It's just the screwups that have to be compensated for......


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ericdan said:

If this was a processing error then I would expect the entire roll to be bad.


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Yes, bad processing effects all the frames on a roll.

If the film is developed commercially the odds of bad processing are fairly low. If you think you have this problem switch labs, if the problem persists it's probably not the processing.

In this scenario the lab scan and digital processing issues have to be ruled out though and that is not a trivial task.

mrred said:

I couldn't disagree more. More time has been spent on the zone system to do just that. The c41 process intent is to standardise exposure, film and chemistry. It's just the screwups that have to be compensated for......


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IMO Adams and the other zone system promoters tried to make shooting and printing simpler for the masses by creating a system. The zone system has been a true boon to photography, it inspired many and made photography accessible.

To a significant extent the zoners promoted the idea that there actually is one specific and correct exposure for each negative as well as a correct way for each and every negative to be developed. People like clear answers, singular answers, and the zone system provides that. Even so the ZS still incorporates print test strips at varying enlarger exposures, the connection between camera exposure and print exposure is a variable and the fix is built in to ZS teaching.

The zone system works well but it is a simplification, the zone system is essentially an industrial process standard, it is a description of one possible path to a great photo among the many paths that actually exist.

The zone system was developed in a world of fixed grade papers and films with shorter straight lines in their curves. It was also developed with certain biases such as minimizing grain. With traditional B&W minimizing exposure helps minimize grain, that bias was designed into the system. IMO the ZS film speed and metering teachings build in safeguards against probably the most prevalent mistake photographers make, underexposure. Those are very reasonable ideas to teach newbies, they are not so necessary for people with more experience or people using different systems.

The zone system is not a description of the science of photography.

Next:

The C-41 process standardized development of the film, not it's exposure.

Negative films, both C-41 and B&W, excel at dealing with camera exposure variations. Negative film's inherent exposure latitude is the technical basis that disposable cameras are designed specifically to exploit. This is one of those "many paths" that I talked about above. It is a different industrial standard, nothing more, nothing less. It is a standard that can still create great results and the reason I can make really cool photos with a Holga without worrying about setting exposure for every frame.

Typically negative films start reaching an exposure level that can create excellent prints at about 1 stop under box speed, that range continues to about 2 stops over box speed. A correct exposure for a negative can be anywhere in that range. Many times good prints can be had well outside that range too. One under to two over is what I would call the safe range.

One place C-41 films differ from B&W is in how grain presents itself. C-41 films typically present less grain when they get more exposure, not less. Maximizing exposure becomes the proper bias if one wants to minimize grain, exactly opposite of the ZS exposure bias.

The point I'm making is that letting exposure float isn't necessarily a screwup, for many it is a conscious creative choice well within the bounds of the science.

markbarendt said:

Yes, bad processing effects all the frames on a roll.

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No doubt about it but you might not see a same effect on every frame. If a frame is a shot of a target of black and white scene as an extreme example then you probably won't see any effect. If the entire roll was shot at a same time on a same location with consistent lighting then you may see a same effect on every frame. I have had many rolls with color crossover fault. It's odd that while some frames were nearly impossible to balance some others look OK after a bit of tweaking of the colors.

Lab processing is not always perfect. Most times they are good or acceptable. Sometimes they came back ugly. That's why I put in a lot of effort in processing my own films.

A ECN or similar film team needing to do location shots with jump cuts would have an incident dome on leading persons nose and a colour temperature meter for each take - a Matt box and colour correction filters, French flag etc.

To day maybe different eg if you are shooting sub standard and are going to high res scan you can post process maybe... The teams I see are still doing it the old school way...

Xmas said:

A ECN or similar film team needing to do location shots with jump cuts would have an incident dome on leading persons nose and a colour temperature meter for each take - a Matt box and colour correction filters, French flag etc.

To day maybe different eg if you are shooting sub standard and are going to high res scan you can post process maybe... The teams I see are still doing it the old school way...

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Surely, and rightly so, I know I'd rather not edit each of 100,000 frames to match the lead actor's face. That is yet another possible path with negatives. Cinematographers are in effect doing the required post work, as pre.

It's not a luxury we all have and for stills it is a luxury we might not even want, because like most luxuries, it isn't free.

I disagree that there are many correct exposure points for C41 color negatives. I don't process my film but send it to a pro lab. I also bracket my shots and then scan them afterwards. What I noticed, even with Portra which is made for scanning and very neutral; in color and contrast, is that although more than one of the bracketed shots seems to be acceptable for general use, the colors shift from one shot to the next due to changes in exposure. Now you might not notice or care if you shoot landscapes. But if you shoot product for catalog advertisements, the colors have to match the product. And there is only one acceptable exposure that will give you the correct colors. This is true with positive chrome film as well. The thing with chromes though is that you know immediately which of the bracketed shots is most correct.

Alan Klein said:

I disagree that there are many correct exposure points for C41 color negatives. I don't process my film but send it to a pro lab. I also bracket my shots and then scan them afterwards. What I noticed, even with Portra which is made for scanning and very neutral; in color and contrast, is that although more than one of the bracketed shots seems to be acceptable for general use, the colors shift from one shot to the next due to changes in exposure. Now you might not notice or care if you shoot landscapes. But if you shoot product for catalog advertisements, the colors have to match the product. And there is only one acceptable exposure that will give you the correct colors. This is true with positive chrome film as well. The thing with chromes though is that you know immediately which of the bracketed shots is most correct.

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I have played with this too. We have different experiences.

What I find is that with bracketed shots when I print a specific subject the same way in each print, the prints are almost indistinguishable.

Ektar, with its high saturation and limited latitude, can be difficult. Portra is more forgiving, but it may not be what you are after. Print films can be corrected for rather large changes in light color temperature during printing. Depending on the equipment, scanning can be more limited, but considerable correction is usually possible. Even with these correction possibilities, use of light balancing filters on the camera is often a good idea. To cool down the late afternoon light, an 82A or 82B filter may the right answer.

I've always considered the Zone System a lousy model for color photography, and in the case of Ektar it can be disastrous. Mess with contrast
and development of the film itself, and you destroy the engineered relation between the respective dyes.