Fujicolor 100

[Henning Serger]

Nice. I am not surprised at all. Somehow this film always felt like being on another level for me. A step above Portras and Fuji's own 400H Pro. I have my last 4 rolls sitting in the freezer and I keep hoping for its return and hopefully even a 120 version.

It is indeed an excellent film (so are Fujicolor 100, discontinued Superia 200 and X-Tra 400 / Superia Premium 400). Grain is a little bit coarser compared to Superia 200.

Best regards,
Henning

 

[Lachlan Young]

I have just not mentioned it above because the topic was medium speed films, not high-speed films. I have tested so far almost all films of the market, and the some remaining not tested yet will be tested in the near future.
So here we go, ISO 400/27° CN films:

Kodak Portra 400 (new, current version): 80 – 100 Lp/mm

Kodak Portra 400 NC-3 (discontinued): 100 – 110 Lp/mm

Kodak Farbwelt 400: 95 – 110 Lp/mm (discontinued; former version of Gold for the German speaking markets)

Kodak Ultra Max 400: 100 – 110 Lp/mm

Fuji Pro 400H: 90 – 105 Lp/mm

Fuji Superia X-Tra 400: 115 (120) – 130 Lp/mm

As for the test result that current Portra 400 has significantly less resolution than its forerunners: That is part of Kodaks 'enhanced for scanning' policy: Those films (it is also valid for Ektar) have finer grain, as grain apperarance is increased by most scanners by scanner noise. Therefore finer grain generally delivers more pleasing scan results. But Kodak unfortunately also sacrificed max. resolution for that. Well, they think max resolution isn't important as scanners cannot use / exploit max. film resolution anyway (but optical printing can), as scanners - especially the most popular and widespred ones (including camera scanning) - have very low resolution values.

Hmm, maybe.

Bits of this test have been bothering me for a few years - not least because I can see clear perceptual differences in the materials that do not translate to resolution test charts (this is why resolution testing is not really used like this as a means of comparing film performance).

There is nothing wrong with your test methodology (in fact it is spot-on enough to actually be able to find the errors), but there are systematic errors at the read-out stage - and they do not account for MTF/ noise relationships being far more important to how we perceive a film being sharp or grainy etc.

You can predict the outcomes of a resolution test once you know the test chart's contrast and have the material's MTF plot (not going to go into massive detail here, but it's covered in the SPSE Handbook) - and your results are accurate enough to suggest that you read them out at around 5% MTF (not extinction - which is the systematic error you made when testing E-6 materials - you appear to have read them at extinction, not 5%, thus they cannot be directly compared with C-41 results - and that makes sense when trying to understand why claims of E-6 resolution do not stack up with the visually obvious optical behaviour of the materials when used for anything other than direct viewing). Having worked with essentially all the materials listed, I can state that by the time you are getting to the point that that level of resolution may or may not make a difference, the noise/ granularity of the material will impact far more on its ability to transmit any useful information from low-contrast real-world objects.

Long story short: most C-41 ISO 400 materials run out of visually detectable (under high contrast test conditions) resolution by around 100lp/mm +/- 10%, but our visual impressions of the materials are formed much more by what they are doing around 10-15lp/mm (cyc/mm) and when visual granularity/ noise kicks in - along with the characteristics of the rest of the optical system being used - be it the MTF of directly exposed print materials (and lenses involved) or the MTF characteristics of whatever scanner was used (which cannot exceed 100% MTF response at low frequencies). Kodak, Fuji, Ilford etc know this (as do Zeiss etc) and it has underpinned the way they make materials - i.e. the more sharpness you can get at low frequencies, the sharper the material will look, but too much sharpness at too high a frequency and the harder that detail obliterating noise/ granularity will kick in.

 

[Brad Deputy]

Hello Brad,

as promised here my test results. Done in my standard test I have develped over about 30 years of intensive tests of films, lenses, sensors. My test methodology was checked and confirmed by Dr. Hubert Nasse from Zeiss, too. He was responsible for lens tests at Zeiss for many years (R.I.P.).
And film and developer manufacturers ask me to check / double-check their test results, too. In my test archive are meanwhile more than 10,000 test results, and the number continues to increase.

Henning, this is amazing! There is literally nowhere else on the internet that I can find this info. Thank you!

So what I'm seeing (and learning) is that smaller grain does not necessarily mean higher resolution. smaller grain tends to soften the finer details; they may improve what the eye sees at first glance (like scaling up a lower resolution digital picture), but they don't improve the actual details captured.

I too have found an affinity to Fuji's consumer films; I find their colors are more true to life than Kodak's slightly yellowish palette. But I've seen amazing photos from either film. To see Fuji's films with higher resolution does not surprise me I guess.

Thanks again for posting your test results.

 

[hanhasgotqi]

Sorry to revive an old thread. The only 135 Fuji color negative films available where I am are Fujicolor 100 and Superia Premium 400. I shoot landscapes in deep mountain valleys in Tibet. During golden hours, sometimes the dynamic range here is too large to be captured on slide film, with snowy peaks or bright skies often blown out. I've used Fuji Pro400H and Portra 400 in 120 formats with some success. Portra 160 (in 135 format) seems to fare not as well in high-contrast scenes. This webpage claims that Portra 400 has up to 12 stops of dynamic range, whereas Portra 160 has around 7.

Does anyone know how many stops of dynamic range Fujicolor 100 has? And, if Fuji's Superia Premium 400 also has significantly more dynamic range than its ISO 100 counterpart?

Thanks in advance. Cheers.

 

[MattKing]

Welcome to Photrio.
I'm skeptical about the claims about the Portra line in that linked web page.
From the datasheets:

 

[dokko]

This webpage claims that Portra 400 has up to 12 stops of dynamic range, whereas Portra 160 has around 7.

It‘s not a very good idea to take any webpage seriously, which claims that Portra 800 has a dynamic range of 12.5stops, Portra 400 12stops, Portra 160 7stops and ColorPlus 2stops.
It clearly shows that the author has not really enough technical background to know what he‘s writing about (the Portra 160 and ColorPlus values are clearly wrong and anybody who writes about these terms should know immediately they mixed something up).

Does anyone know how many stops of dynamic range Fujicolor 100 has? And, if Fuji's Superia Premium 400 also has significantly more dynamic range than its ISO 100 counterpart?

Good question. I haven‘t done any controlled tests, but the difference between all modern negative films is quite small, and all of them have a massivily bigger range than slide films.

If I were to guess the order would probably be something like:

Portra 800 , Portra 400 and Portra 160 are very similar
Superia Premium 400 probably one stop less
Fuji 100 probably one stop less

It also depends a lot on your workflow.
If you use a high quality scanner, you can get all of the dynamic range out of the film.
If you do analog printing yourself, you‘ll need to do dodging and burning to get the best results
If you use the common lab scans (Frontier or Noritsu) all bets are off and usually you‘ll get severely compromised dynamic range.

 

[hanhasgotqi]

Thank you for the replies. Sorry that I double posted. Dokko, this is really helpful. I've only used common scanners like Noritsu, so will try having some images rescanned with a Hasselblad. Some labs here do offer that option.

MattKing, thanks for the Portra data sheets. I'm not sure if I understand the graphs. Am I right that the graph relevant to dynamic range is the first one in each document, the one labeled "characteristic curves"? I'm looking at it as meaning that the exposure has a latitude of -3 stops to +3 stops. I'm probably interpreting it wrong.

 

[MattKing]

MattKing, thanks for the Portra data sheets. I'm not sure if I understand the graphs. Am I right that the graph relevant to dynamic range is the first one in each document, the one labeled "characteristic curves"? I'm looking at it as meaning that the exposure has a latitude of -3 stops to +3 stops. I'm probably interpreting it wrong.

You are correct, but it is important to understand that the curves are truncated, in that the only data reported is the data that corresponds to where the films' performance is linear and fully usable in real world situations.
There will be response past the end of those curves. It is just that past those ends the quality of reproduction will be much less valuable.
I shared those, because they show how similar the film response is in the range where it is fully usable. The fact that one can get a bit more low quality response past the ends of the curves doesn't really tell you much of value if you intend to take photos that print or display well.

 

[koraks]

will try having some images rescanned with a Hasselblad. Some labs here do offer that option.

When it comes to dynamic range, it's not so much the brand of scanner that matters. It's how you operate the scanner. What tends to work well, is to scan color negatives as if they were slides (make sure to scan in 16 bit depth) and then do the inversion and color balancing manually. The initial output of the scanner will quite low-contrast, but it prevents any automatic color balancing routines in the scanning software from blowing out highlights or lopping off shadow detail.

If you do analog printing yourself, you‘ll need to do dodging and burning to get the best results

The opportunities for burning & dodging are generally limited when printing at small to moderate (let's say 11x14") print sizes due to the high speed of the paper. Exposures are usually in the single-digit seconds. Flashing the paper can be very effective in flattening out highlights (with the obvious drawback that they get, well, flattened out). Flashing also has the advantage that it can be used to alter color crossover behavior to an extent. Another option is masking, but this of course is extremely time-consuming.

Am I right that the graph relevant to dynamic range is the first one in each document, the one labeled "characteristic curves"?

Yes.

I'm looking at it as meaning that the exposure has a latitude of -3 stops to +3 stops. I'm probably interpreting it wrong.

You're indeed interpreting it wrong. The x-axis is 'log exposure', not stops. Approx. 0.3logE = 1 stop. But you have to look closely at what part of the curve is actually usable:

I drew in red lines that show the approximate range over which the film can be expected to yield good/excellent results. At the left end, the range is restricted by the 'toe' of the curve where it flattens out; these are the deepest shadows and as you know, underexposing negative film makes the shadows turn into undifferentiated mush. That's what happens if you allow important parts of the scene to land in this toe region, or even to the left of it.

On the other end, the range is restricted by the crossover behavior of the film. As you can see, beyond the ca. 0.25 mark, the red curve starts to flatten off a little bit. The net result image-wise is that highlights that received this amount of exposure will be relatively cyan (lacking in red). You can't always prevent that sections of your image land on this part of the curve (brightly-lit clouds or snow-capped peaks), but it's best to prevent important parts of the scene to steer clear of this part of the curve.

As you can tell, this leaves a part of the curve that runs from ca. -2.1logE to 0.25logE, so a range of ca. 2.3-2.4logE. Divide by 0.3 gives 7.5 to 8 stops of range in which the film can be expected to yield very good results. Below that (underexposure), things will turn into muddy mush. Above it, you'll run into cyan crossover territory. The latter is generally more desirable (less problematic) than the former. Because of that compromise, people sometimes argue that the dynamic range of the film is much greater than the ca. 8 stops. Sure - if you're willing to sacrifice some color fidelity, you could allow highlights to fall in this crossover territory. Especially in the digital darkroom (a.k.a. Photoshop), it's relatively easy to correct any problems that result from this, at least for the most part.

As to Fujicolor 100, it's difficult to get good data on this since this film is available so scarcely and apparently also only in certain parts of the world. There's allegedly a datasheet for it, but I honestly have very severe doubts that it's representative for the product as it's manufactured and sold today - but who knows. It can be found here: https://www.fujifilm.com.hk/products/consumer_film/pdf/superia_100_datasheet.pdf
Let's look at the characteristic curves in that datasheet:

As you can see, the toe region of the curve is quite different from that of Portra 160; while Portra's toe is quite sharp, the toe of this particular Fuji film is very gradual. This makes the choice of what section of it is considered usable quite arbitrary; I've drawn in a rather conservative and arbitrary red line to indicate a possible point. On the other side, it's impossible to give a good cut-off point since the curves run nicely parallel in the plotted section and seem to continue on like this possibly beyond the point where they stop. Assuming that you could at least get good results up to the point where the curves stop, the range would be something like 2.5logE or a little over 8 stops. It's quite possible that you can get a little more range from it in practice.

I hope the above shows a couple of things:
* To an extent, it's possible to derive some insight into dynamic range from a film's datasheet.
* In particular, the datasheet sometimes/often shows what kind of penalties can be expected when trying to use the film beyond its best usable range.
* How big of a dynamic range you attribute to a film depends a lot on how much you're willing to sacrifice in terms of image quality. This explains to a large extent why we often see dramatically different estimates from different people for the same product. My approach above is rather conservative.

In practice, the only really good way to get a feeling for whether the product works for your purpose, it so simply try it out! In doing so, keep in mind that dynamic range is not unlimited and that you don't want to err on the side of underexposure, while at the same time trying to steer clear of the inevitable color crossover due to overexposure at the same time. In other words: try to expose properly, and don't rely on reasoning like "the dynamic range is big enough anyway, I'll just overexpose by a few stops." That may work for (some) B&W film, but with color film, it's more problematic. Also, in assessing your results, keep in mind that scanning and digital post processing are a factor of huge importance. It's to an extent possible to recover some of what may be lost due to unfortunate choices during exposure (or development). Conversely, it's very easy and in fact extremely common to totally destroy an image that in principle comes from a decent negative due to incompetent scanning and post processing choices. The long & short of it is that in all honesty, the time you invest in selecting the right film for the job is likely better spent learning everything you can about color scanning and editing...

 

[dokko]

Thank you for the replies. Sorry that I double posted. Dokko, this is really helpful. I've only used common scanners like Noritsu, so will try having some images rescanned with a Hasselblad. Some labs here do offer that option.

Yes, a scan from a Hasselblad X1 or X5 will give you much better shadow and highlight detail than one from a Noritsu. If you are doing the fine editing yourself, make sure you specify you‘d like a flat scan with all the shadow and highlight details so you can adjust the contrast to your taste.

International shipping is unfortunately a bit of a hassle, but if you want you‘re welcome to send me a some negatives and I‘ll scan them on my dokko scanner for free - would be great to see your photographs (I always wanted to visit Tibet).

MattKing, thanks for the Portra data sheets. I'm not sure if I understand the graphs. Am I right that the graph relevant to dynamic range is the first one in each document, the one labeled "characteristic curves"? I'm looking at it as meaning that the exposure has a latitude of -3 stops to +3 stops. I'm probably interpreting it wrong.

Yes, the characteristic curves show the density related to the exposure.
So the bigger the range on the exposure scale which change in density, the higher the dynamic range.
The confusing part is that the exposure is in log scale, so the -4 to 1 scale on the horizontal axis represents the absolute exposure, with 0.3 representing approximately 1 f-stop of change. So if we would see the graph shouldering off on the right side we could calculate the full dynamic range.

Exposure latitude is a relative term which tries to describe how much over and under exposure a film can tolerate, but this depends not only on the film but also on your subject contrast. A low contrast scene can easily tolerate 1 stop under and 3 stops overexposure without a significant problem, but a high contrast scene will have 0 stops.

 

[hanhasgotqi]

Wow, thank you koraks and dokko, learnt a lot in these 2 posts. The warning against solely relying on dynamic range numbers is very important. Shooting film in mountainous terrains with dramatic shadows and bright peaks and clouds, I've realized I have to be a lot more deliberate than just metering for the shadows and letting the highlights fall where they may be. Sometimes a scene is just too contrasty, no matter how beautiful it is to the naked eye. Koraks, I also like the point that "the time you invest in selecting the right film for the job is likely better spent learning everything you can about color scanning and editing" Good stuff!

 

[dokko]

Sometimes a scene is just too contrasty, no matter how beautiful it is to the naked eye.

yes, exactly (one typical example of this is when shooting from a dark interior place to a bright exterior).

we could do two exposures there and combine them, but that brings it's own set of problems: the typical display medium has less contrast than a typical real world had, some tone mapping has to be done. and in extreme examples this starts to look artifical.

in your case, a mountain scene might have something like 15 stops of brightness range, the film can capture around 10-12 stops, and a gloss photo paper has around 5 stops (matt around 4 stops).
A typical computer display in a normal environment has around 7-9 stops.

so things usually look more realistic if we let the shadows or highlights loose detail and focus on the mid tones.

this situation is changing with modern HDR screens, bit while they look spectacular they also loose the painterly character of a print.

Koraks, I also like the point that "the time you invest in selecting the right film for the job is likely better spent learning everything you can about color scanning and editing" Good stuff!

yes, this is very good advice in general, specially for beginners and with small differences in films.

there are exceptions in the extremes though.
as an example: if I'm taking portraits and like naturalistic skin tones, I'm much better off using Kodak Portra 800 than Kodak Ektar, and no amount of good scanning or editing will bring the Ektar to the level of a good Portra 800 scan (of course it's always possible to mess up the latter).

 

[hanhasgotqi]

in your case, a mountain scene might have something like 15 stops of brightness range, the film can capture around 10-12 stops, and a gloss photo paper has around 5 stops (matt around 4 stops).
A typical computer display in a normal environment has around 7-9 stops.

This is interesting. Thank you for the reply, dokko. I went back to film about 7 years ago, mainly for the experience of having a simple camera and not having to worry about menus and settings. Never actually printed my own pictures, just asked shops to do it. Does this mean that, when we print images onto photo papers, we lose details outside of that 5/4 stops of paper DR which were originally captured on the negatives?

I also just assumed that a quality computer display has all the dynamic range in the world. Guess not.

 

[koraks]

Does this mean that, when we print images onto photo papers, we lose details outside of that 5/4 stops of paper DR which were originally captured on the negatives?

It's a little more complicated than that. The real answer is that no, you don't necessarily lose anything, but that in practice, a shop will generally chop off something from either (or both) end(s) of the dynamic range of the negative in printing when a very high contrast negative is being printed.

It's important to keep in mind that the different contrast ranges @dokko mentioned are not mapped straight onto each other. So it's not the case that from, let's say, a 12 stop scene brightness range a subset of 4-5 stops will be selected and that will end up on the paper. During film development and printing, compression and expansion can (and will) take place. This already results in a vastly reduced density range in the negative - the normal gamma of color negative film is around 0.63, which means that each stop of brightness difference in the original scene will translate to 0.63 stops of density difference in the negative. So the original scene is contracted into a narrower range, but not necessarily with loss of information - e.g. a 10-stop scene will end up occupying a little over 6 stops of density on the negative and nothing is lost. In printing, similar processes take place. Especially in today's printing world where a print from a negative is nearly always a digital print from a digital scan from the original negative, the relationship between the contrast of the negative is dynamic and can be adjusted (often automatically) to get the most pleasing print, regardless if the original scan is low or high in contrast.

All this implies that there's no single, 1:1 relationship between stops of original scene brightness range and stops of density on paper.

I also just assumed that a quality computer display has all the dynamic range in the world. Guess not.

The dynamic range in the real world is unlimited by definition. The most extreme dynamic range imaginable would be between an absolute black (no photos at all) and the densest photon flux that's physically possible (which would incinerate all matter- and arguably, the densest conceivable photon flux would amount to a black hole, interestingly!). Evidently, a computer monitor has only a rather small range compared to this theoretical (and rather nonsensical) maximum conceivable range. Notice how a computer screen is easily overpowered by afternoon sunlight streaming into a room through a south-facing window? That's how limited the dynamic range of your monitor is; it can't even keep up with common daylight.

Fortunately, the limited dynamic range of a computer monitor or (even 'worse') a print isn't much of a problem. This is because psychologically, our vision adjusts to a large extent to the dynamic range of the medium, resulting in the white on a print looking very bright and the black seeming very dark, even though the absolute difference in light intensity is minimal compared to what you can see just looking out of the window.

In the end, the absolute number of stops available on a medium only tells you a small part of the story. The bigger story is how we can map the range of light intensities of a real-world scene onto the range available on the paper. It turns out that many non-linearities in this process actually help in achieving a natural look. The more you think about this, the more counter-intuitive this becomes - but don't worry too much about it: as long as it looks good, it's OK.

 

[dokko]

Does this mean that, when we print images onto photo papers, we lose details outside of that 5/4 stops of paper DR which were originally captured on the negatives?

well, you could print the whole dynamic range of the scene to a paper, but usually it won't look pretty...

to illustrate the problem in an extreme case:

let's say we capture a scene with 20stops in the real world (for example say person in a dark tunnel with sunlight outside) by combining two exposures with either a film or digital camera. this results in a contrast ratio of about 1'000'000:1

the papers brightest white will reflect about 90% of the incoming light, and the darkest part about 3%, resulting in a contrast ratio of about 30:1.

if we want, we can preserve the full information of the original scene in the print, but that means we have to lower the contrast to squish about 4 stops of the original into 1 stops on the paper.
the result of this will be a very low contrast, greyish looking image, which has nothing to do with the feeling of the original situation.
in order to make it "look real", we usually select the most important 3 stops (let's say the face of the person) to render with somewhat normal (only slightly reduced) contrast on the paper, and choose to squish the shadows and the highlight non-linearly into the remaining paper range.

the nice thing is that analog film basically does this by default in a very pleasing way, while with digital cameras, the software has to simulate it.

by the way, this process is a sort of tone mapping, but most people use the term for squishing HDR images into a screen contrast range with local contrast adjustments that look very artificial.

and to your original question:
yes, we loose a lot of the detail that was captured in the negative when printing in order to make it look punchy.
the good thing is that this gives us possibilities to adjust the overall brightness somewhat if we didn't get the exposure right. We can also choose to recover detail in local parts of the image (like lighten the dark tunnel and darken the bright outside while keeping the face contrast unaffected).

 

[koraks]

@dokko I think your story overlooks the often very effective work that has been done for over a century with local contrast adjustments (I acknowledge your mention of failure in the HDR domain) through e.g. burning & dodging and various other darkroom as well as digital tools.

I'd go so far as to say that the art of printing revolves to a large extent or perhaps almost entirely about the question how an inherently large-DR reality can be crammed into the inherently low reflectance range of paper. I feel there are also millions of examples out there that illustrate very compellingly how this can be done successfully. Of course, expecting that 'the lab' will do this for €0.10 prints is out of the question - although a competent commercial printer can work magic on an image - film-based or digital.