fuji pro 400 h (accurate collors)

[Grinschus]

Hallo,

i wanted to ask for some advice with fuji pro 400h in relation to a documentary work i am gonna start in a few weeks.Basicly i need some accurate colorpalette for this work.
Do you have any idea about metering and developing to get results - regarding to the colors and contrast - similair to this (just the shadows should have a little bit more datils):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/quitti/4668713886/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quitti/4682417718/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quitti/4663741510/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quitti/4479504160/

I really love this skintones, too.
At the beginning it looks like rated at box speed (or even underexposed?).
Highlights and shadows are somehow creamy, aswell like the midtones, but without having this typicall 2-stops-overated peachy/pink look.



Is it about the paper? Or mybe about the lens.

I contact the photographer and she told me, that she works with some plastic lens and has no idea about metering. Regarding to this, there is definitly no push - process.
She told me asweel, that these are labprints, which have been scanned after on flatbed and increased in contrast with photoshop.

Thank you for the answers

 

[Truzi]

Shoot some quickly and see how you like it before your project.

I've used some and love it - for nature scenes. For skin, it was a bit red for my tastes. The place I had it done at scans and prints RA-4. I have a copy of the scans, which are not color corrected. Trees, bushes, grass, etc. came out very nice. Skin tones were too red, in some cases extremely so. I'm not sure I'd say "inaccurate" so much as gross exaggeration - to the point of looking like rosacea in a few shots.

They did correct in printing, and everything looked very nice. So with post processing, you are probably good. It depends on what you are going to do with the film.

Consider Kodak Portra. It is an excellent film. I do like Fuji 400h a lot, but Portra is great as well - perhaps better for skin tones as-is.

 

[Grinschus]

hey

i tried portra 400. very good film, but the emulsion is too fine...looks somekind of digital in 120...or maybe it is the combination with zeiss-lens
...and there is much Yelloooow...
Similair as fuji overexposed 1-2 stops.

These examples on the top have been shot on fuji pr 400 h..for me the skintones look really good.
But where can i get the contrast? Fuji rated at 400 is really flat. I got results (i am not happy with) pretty similair to these:
http://www.google.de/imgres?q=fuji+...&tbnw=200&ndsp=43&ved=1t:429,r:51,s:100,i:158


Maybe i shold test unddrexposing a half stop...any experiences. What colorshift will i expect? red to magenta?
Or underexposing with a long exposure time in darkroom( shouldn't this increase the contrast, too?)

 

[Truzi]

I've not played with under- or over- exposure of color film, so I can't help there. I'm sure others will be along with better information than I can give.

However, keep in mind that you don't know what the lab did when printing to balance the color. If your final images will be lab prints, then you probably don't have to worry. The film is good and can do skin tones well when corrected in post-production. Then again, many films can be corrected in post-production. If you will be using digital files of the scans, you may have to do some computer work on them (and may get nasty comments on APUG when asking about digital files, which is what DPUG is for).

I do think the colors in 400H (when corrected) are realistic and very nice. Unlike some other films, or even other offerings from Fuji.

 

[polyglot]

If your Portra is showing up yellow, you're either postprocessing or printing it wrong.

Those shots you linked, well, they look like 400H. Just shoot it at box speed or maybe 200, and it will come out good with straight processing. You don't need to do any fancy manipulations to it. Note the latter example (flat) that you posted was obviously shot in very flat light, and you're comparing it to photos that have had the contrast artificially boosted.

If you're printing directly to RA4, all of the current papers are pretty high contrast, so you are likely to get a boost from that whether you want it or not, but that only applies if you're not printing digitally and I bet your lab is. If you develop your own C41, you can push-process it: an extra 30s of development will increase the contrast and saturation. But that's completely pointless if you're printing digitally.

 

[Mr Bill]

I've not played with under- or over- exposure of color film, so I can't help there. I'm sure others will be along with better information than I can give.

Hi, I have quite a lot of pro lab experience with this sort of thing, and the bottom line is that you should not generally expect color shifts from changing exposure. (Note that my main experience is limited to a handful of pro color neg films, mainly Kodak VPS and Portra, in the slower speeds. But any pro film should perform in the same manner, and I'd be real surprised if Fuji 400H did not.)

There WILL be problems if you UNDEREXPOSE; this will mainly be losing your ability to print solid blacks, and what you have will get very grainy. This is due to the way these films are made - typically there is a 'fast' layer in each color, and it has larger grain. If most of your exposure is in these grainy layers, then the grain will tend to show. So your goal is to never underexpose a color neg film.

If you OVEREXPOSE moderately, even up to 2 or 3 stops, you should essentially not notice a difference in proper color-corrected prints. (For completeness of information, slight printing adjustments may need to be made; in the lab business this is well known and is set up in automated printing machines using a set of what are known as "slope negatives.") (Perhaps I should mention that I'm talking mainly about traditional optical prints.)

ps: Polyglot sounds right to me, except that I'm not familiar with current papers printed optically.

 

[Mr Bill]

But where can i get the contrast? Fuji rated at 400 is really flat. I got results (i am not happy with) pretty similair to these:
http://www.google.de/imgres?q=fuji+...&tbnw=200&ndsp=43&ved=1t:429,r:51,s:100,i:158

Yes, I agree that these samples don't have very good color. But that's the fault of the printer or scanner operator, not the film. The film has a wide latitude, so as the color of the light changes, this is all correctable at the printing stage; this is the standard way of handling color neg film.

These particular samples all have a "cold" or "cool" appearance to the skin tones. This means that they have a bluish, or perhaps cyan tone. If the printer (or scan operator) would add some yellow to the images (for the guy with long hair, probably some green), they might look pretty good.

With respect to the contrast, the best thing is to take care of this in the original photography, by arranging for the light to give the contrast. Otherwise, one could scan and manipulate that image, but this website is for the traditional methods, not digital. But changing camera exposure, with a well-behaved film, simply does not affect contrast or color noticably. If you see a case where it seems to, this has almost certainly been caused by the printing or scanning operation.

 

[Grinschus]

wow, thak you for the answers! Very clear and to the point

As what i see there one question coming up now:

Since you are talking about increasing the contrast via scanning/Post (with scanned files) or via pushing or via increasing exposuretime with RA4
(i am not sure what the workflow i will use - actually i am waiting for the results of some testrolls) i was thinking about different lighting situations in this documentary.

Should i alway rate at the same iso in the shadows - in direct sun and flat light - to make different pictures fit to one harmonic series?


best regards,grinschus

 

[Grinschus]

*update

 

[tsiklonaut]

Should i alway rate at the same iso in the shadows - in direct sun and flat light - to make different pictures fit to one harmonic series?

Depends what sort of meter you use and what results you're hunting for. If you run a proper spotmeter then measure from the shadows and rate it to the box speed of ASA400, if using averaging- or even camera's matrix- metering then I rate the film to ASA250 or thereabouts, incident meter: ASA320 does fairly good for me.

On colors and contrasts: it all comes down to inversion technique. Many softwares using automatic functions do NOT invert your negatives well enough - don't wast your time to straight invert function. Sometimes they may hit the nail when you have a very bright, dark and natural gray represented on the frame, so automatic adjustments can lock the settings around those once you auto-level and auto-color it after direct-invert, but it's rare to have it all well-balanced.

Hence inverting smartly is the way to go - when inverted "right", then everything else becomes less problematic later on. Many people say good words about Color Perfect plugin for inversion, I'm using my own simple curves recipe for inversion that doesn't require any special software - any image editor with curve functions can do it. It's important to scan negatives as positives and linear (flat TIF), 16bit scans (with no adjustments at all, even white- or black points must be left alone) are highly recommended since you'll lose a lot of depth during inversion so 8-bit scan files can get very restrictive in tonal quality. I've created a set of my own unique curves for each emulsion I can recall as default starting points and customize in case the shooting condition vary (i.e. indoors, outdoors, contrasty, long exposure shots etc when the curves shift).

Some Pro400 examples in different light: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Most of them spotmetered from the shadows.

Hope this helps,
Margus