Follow on: Color - Chromes or Negs? (or Digital) What do you do these days?

Pakor, formerly Pakon, formerly Pako are alive and well in Minnesota USA. They handle Kodak and Fuji control strips. C-41, E-6 and RA-4 85 to 100 USD per box plus shipping. I have decent condition old Kodak color charts that can be included in a test shot that are valuable for color balance. Unless as has already been stated you have a small laboratory setup with a pH meter and a couple burettes for titration to a specific pH, a color densitometer etc, control strips are a waste of time.

In the old E2, E3 days Kodak would specify how many cc's of 10 % sodium hydroxide solution needed to be added after each roll of film.

I buy color chemistry in bulk from Unique photo. It's so cheap if you buy Fuji E6 chemistry as used by the big labs I make up a liter develop 2 or 3 films and toss.

Why abandon chromes just because Cibachrome is gone? It's pretty easy to do reversal on RA-4 paper -- you just need to add a suitable first developer step (chemical and time), then process in the light after stop bath and water wash (to remove the stop bath before the print goes into the color developer). Contrast control can be done the way it is for regular prints from color negatives (peroxide or sulfite added to the color dev) or via control of first dev time (if not developing to completion).

hi skip
these days when I shoot color film of any sort, whether it is roll film, or sheet film, chromes or negative, I develop in black and white chemistry so it ends up as b/w negatives, sometimes with a color cast, sometimes not, and I either contact print it on black and white paper or I scan. as you know, I use coffee developer and print developer in tandem so the stain from the developer sometimes masks the color mask from the film. I mainly do this because while I have a lab that I can use that is nearby to developer my film ( upto 120 ) it costs more money than I wanna to spend on the expired film I tend to shoot and at least I know what my own results will be, and while I have a rotary processor ( unicolor drum ) I really don't want to deal with disposal of the chemistry.
if the images have to be in color I do 1 of 3 things.. I either shoot it with a digital camera ( a d300 I bought from someone here last year, or my cellphone ) or I use RGB filters on my pan chromatic film and scan and make modern-trichomes ... or if the image doesn't rely on reality, I use watercolor or crayon on cyanotype. im not too religious on much of this stuff, but the said I can see how some people are ....

John

From my first six shots using Velvia 50 with 4x5. Scanned with Epson V850. The main changes were the temperature +30 in Lightroom to eliminate the magenta cast on the fence. I also used the shadow slider to lighten up the two chimneys that were pretty much black beforehand. The rest was standard spotting the dust out and sharpening and some increase to exposure. I have other shots where the shadows in the trees are very black. I have to play with them a little more to see if I can do anything with them. I might try Provia 100 next time or give Ektar 100 another shot. I had problems with Ektar previously with 120 film getting the colors right.

Craig House 3 by Alan Klein, on Flickr

I think it was underexposed a little counting for the magenta cast even in other parts of the picture. Here's the before and after.

Donald Qualls said:

I like looking at chromes. One of the most religious experiences of my life was, around 1974, opening the envelope with my first roll of unmounted (because full frame) 127 Ektachrome (from a Baby Brownie -- I still have no idea how all eight exposures came out bang-on with that simple camera).

[...]

FWIW, I think almost everyone here scans film in some fashion -- it's the only way other than scanning or digitally photographing a print to put your work up on Photrio. I haven't gotten to print yet since getting my darkroom built, so all the film I've shot this year has been scanned. I personally try very hard to do the minimum processing to the scans to emulate a straight print. I'm not interested in creating a work of digital art based on a film photograph; I'm interested in showing my film photograph on this digital medium.

Click to expand...

Similar story here, my 1st roll of 120 was my 2nd best photographic experience (it was Velvia and around 2003, from a Yashica Mat 124G - I was silly enough to trust the old internal meter but the pics turned out perfectly exposed)
My 1st best photographic experience was when I projected the slides a few months later.

Depending on your scanning process / software / etc., slides usually are much easier to scan than color negs. I do DSLR scanning and provided the color temperature is correctly adjusted, "what you see (on the slide) is what you get (on the screen)" without much - if any - processing.

Alan Edward Klein said:

I think it was underexposed a little counting for the magenta cast even in other parts of the picture. Here's the before and after.

View attachment 253545

Click to expand...

Terrific picture, thanks for sharing!
I have often seen brownish/purpleish cast on Velvia 100 but not on Velvia 50. (Note: on the film, not on scans). That's why, out of the 2, I prefer Velvia 50.

Donald Qualls said:

Why abandon chromes just because Cibachrome is gone? It's pretty easy to do reversal on RA-4 paper -- you just need to add a suitable first developer step (chemical and time), then process in the light after stop bath and water wash (to remove the stop bath before the print goes into the color developer). Contrast control can be done the way it is for regular prints from color negatives (peroxide or sulfite added to the color dev) or via control of first dev time (if not developing to completion).

Click to expand...

Agree with Donald here.
Apart from the "chemical way" of doing prints he describes here, there's also the possibility of scanning + digital printing.
And of course there's projection, which can only be done with chromes... (in my opinion, everyone who says a digital picture on a TV screen - or worse a digital projector - is equally good as a projected slide has never seen a projected medium format slide )

If someone learned to do contrast masking for Ciba and still has the registration punch and frame, they can adapt that experience and make weaker masks suitable for sandwiching with the original chrome to generate contact Portra 160 internegs highly suitable for RA4 enlargements. A bit of a learning curve like anything else, and a lot more predictable than reversal processing. What is a digital projector? - is that where you cut a finger off and use a slingshot to shoot it across the room? (They had one where I last worked, and yeah, it was like looking at something squashed.)