Fujifilm 400H Pro - what is it for?

@pentaxuser you're the glue that's holding us together in these difficult times!

Bormental said:

@pentaxuser you're the glue that's holding us together in these difficult times!

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Thanks, can I use that quote in my next presidential campaign

pentxuser

koraks said:

No worries, it's all good.
I understand it may seem boring to hear me (and perhaps some others)say the same things about scanning over and over again - but the issues associated are systematic and all too often overlooked.
I don't think the maker of that video is a moron or anything like that. It's just that he did point out (somewhat indirectly) that a lab did the scanning for him. The lab may have done a great job in terms of consistency, or maybe they didn't.

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Perhaps I can un-lurk for a moment and finally chime in with a bit of useful information from my experience. I have a Noritsu LS600 scanner and have investigated its behaviour fairly thoroughly.

It's quite likely that the lab used a minilab scanner like the Noritsu (or perhaps a Frontier, which behaves similarly). These minilab scanners perform an auto-exposure and auto-colour balance on every frame, under the hood. Yes, underexposed shots will look slightly darker and over exposed will look slightly brighter, but the scanner generally tries to make the average values of the negative close to middle grey, as an evaluative meter might in a camera. Similarly, the scanner will try to balance the colour. Here is the Noritsu at default settings scanning a series of shots of the neutral grey bottom portion of an IT8 chart (bottom of the frame) laid over a neutral grey background (first pic) and then coloured cards (the rest). Notice how the colour of the neutral grey shifts to the opposite of the predominant colour cast in these.


Sorry for the poor quality. It's a screengrab from a FaceBook group.

So this little test provides an extreme illustration of how a minilab scanner compensates for colour. There is some algorithm that looks at the colour in the negative and performs a colour balancing operation accordingly. This can be a little disconcerting to the scanner operator when faced with a series of shots taken in the same lighting and with the same settings: there are often slight colour imbalances from one frame to the next as the algorithm adjusts for the shifts in predominance of colour due to different framing. The immediate response is to use the scanner's cyan, magenta and yellow colour balance controls to balance for these. Or, the Noritsu offers a sub-menu option to apply the same exposure and colour balance compensation to all frames.

So in the case of a bracketed sequence, the colour in the original scene is constant, but on the negative it's not. There are differences in brightness (which the scanner will try to adjust for) and there are various differences in colour (due both to colour crossover and also a variance of saturation and hue with exposure level).... and the scanner also will try to adjust for this.

That explains why all of the scans in that video have similar-ish exposure levels. It also explains why koraks is correct to maintain that we can't properly draw useful conclusions about hue (in particular) as the scanner is making colour balance adjustments under the hood that vary from frame to frame.

@LolaColor, thank your very much for posting this illustrative example and accompanying explanation. This is indeed the very problem I'm worried about and that I have seen with various consumer scanners. It's very useful to know that 'pro-lab' scanners such as Noritsus and Frontiers behave in similar ways. The auto-correction they do may be a huge productivity boost for non-critical consumer work, but it becomes a headache in cases where you really need more control over consistency.

Another issue that I haven't touched upon specifically is the risk of non-linearities in the scanning process. A scanner essentially captures an analog signal and then converts it to a digital value. Particularly in the analog part, it's unreasonable to expect perfect linearity. Put differently: a scanning element (e.g. a 'pixel' in a CCD array) is unlikely to track its output signal in perfect proportionality with changes in the input. Over a certain range, linearity may be quite OK, but once you land outside this range, all bets are off. Especially when trying to scan parts of film with a very high density (meaning only a little bit of light is available for signal capture), it's quite possible that linearity suffers. If this also happens to varying degrees depending on which color is being captured (which, again, is not just possible, but in fact highly likely), color casts and in fact color crossover will be present in the digital representation even if it's not actually there in the film.

The problems with scanning are that we're dealing with partly intentional but uncontrollable adjustments (the 'under the hood' behavior of a scanner and particular its firmware and software as implemented by the manufacturer), and we also have undesirable behavior due to technical limitations (such as imperfect sensors and amplifiers) to contend with. The inconvenient conclusion of all this is that it's very difficult indeed to say something meaningful about how the color balance of a film behaves once you start taking it too far beyond its normal exposure range. While my personal stance is that an old-fashioned RA4 contact print is a more feasible way of getting a feel for how a film behaves (at least for amateurs like myself), I'm also very well aware that such an approach is still not bullet proof. All this leaves us with the somewhat nasty situation that in all honesty, we usually can't really tell accurately how a film behaves, especially if you start overexposing it by more than 2 stops or so, simply because we don't have the means to evaluate it with sufficient fidelity.

Apologies for the wall of images, but for what it's worth, here are some scans from a Noritsu of a bracketed IT8 chart shot on 400H at one stop intervals. Each scan was manually balanced on a Noritsu with "under the hood" adjustments disabled, so that patch F16 (18% reflectance) averages out to around 119, 119, 119 sRGB (middle grey) in each image.

If you download and flick through them you'll get a good visual indication of how contrast, colour casts, colour saturation and individual hues shift with varying exposure of Fuji 400H.... when scanned on a minilab scanner. Other scanning workflows will give slightly different results. But the general trend should hold true. The sequence is from -3 to +6, as noted below each image.



-3


-2


-1


0


+1


+2


+3


+4


+5


+6

Thank you Lolacolor!
Could I impose upon you for a favor?
Could you re-post your last two posts in their own thread in this subforum? A thread title like "Norritsu Scanner performance with Fujifilm 400H Pro".
We can then advocate with the moderators to make the thread a "Sticky" thread, which would make it easier to refer to in subsequent discussions.
These are excellent, easy to understand and highly demonstrative references, and they deserve to be easily found.

@MattKing maybe place it under "Resources" where Adian's been posting his B/W curves?

Bormental said:

@MattKing maybe place it under "Resources" where Adian's been posting his B/W curves?

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That would be another good location!

@MattKing yes I can do that! I have the same test shot on Portra 400 and Ektar 100. When I scan those in the same way then I'll make a new thread

LolaColor said:

@MattKing yes I can do that! I have the same test shot on Portra 400 and Ektar 100. When I scan those in the same way then I'll make a new thread

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Great!

I have a few RA4 prints from 6x6 400H negatives. Shockingly my one period of RA4 printing has been a year and a half ago. I'm long overdue for the next switchover from b/w... Anyway, these seem to be prints from my first enlargements. The colour balancing was likely not perfect. Digitising the prints wasn't easy either. I used the same copy stand I'm using for digitising negatives, but lighting the prints is a challenge. I'll need something proper, eventually.

I did try to use an Xrite passport mini, though to profile the digital camera in these shots to try an reproduce the prints as well as possible.





Edit: This film was developed by MyFilmLab and I also have got scans from them. I used them two or three times to get 'reference scans' to see what a good scan might look like and what each type of film is 'supposed' to look like when scanned. If there is interest I can post the corresponding scans as well. Generally they are more vivid and brighter that what I produced here.

Oh, and the paper use here was Kodak Endura Premier. At the time a dealer cut and sold it in boxes but stopped doing so as I started printing, so I bought a roll and cut it down myself.

Bormental said:

Also, you bring up scanning in every thread about color. Every. Single. Time. Why stop there? You may as well entertain us about monitor calibration, film development temperature, sRGB color space or even light. They all affect color. If we halt every conversation because of variables involved we will never be able to discuss anything at all.

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Clearly the single biggest factor unaccounted for in this list is the individual's perception of color - are we all calibrated the same . . . and the answer of course is we're not.

When I enlisted in the service, I had to go through a battery of color tests as it was critical for the job I wanted to do. I was surprised to learn a good portion would not get through these tests.

I used to work for an LED sign company and when a new owner took over, we setup a demo of what the signs are capable of showing. After the demo, he said that it looked like $hit but not to fear, he was red-green color blind - the only two colors available for LEDs back then - along with red+green=yellow and all off=black.

Fujifilm states this obvious disparity in a July 1971 ad in Modern Photography . . .



But of course it didn't help when Kodak started using the phrase "scanner friendly" in their new film releases but did not provide a scanning standard - especially for color negatives . . .

Les is there any evidence for those claims about Japanese eyes and the reason ( matching pearls) and if so where might it be found.
It sounds like saying that Scots people as a nation can discern differences in more whiskies because a few of them have been involved in whisky distilling on a commercial scale for maybe 2 hundred years

pentaxuser

Les Sarile said:

Clearly the single biggest factor unaccounted for in this list is the individual's perception of color - are we all calibrated the same . . . and the answer of course is we're not.

When I enlisted in the service, I had to go through a battery of color tests as it was critical for the job I wanted to do. I was surprised to learn a good portion would not get through these tests.

I used to work for an LED sign company and when a new owner took over, we setup a demo of what the signs are capable of showing. After the demo, he said that it looked like $hit but not to fear, he was red-green color blind - the only two colors available for LEDs back then - along with red+green=yellow and all off=black.

Fujifilm states this obvious disparity in a July 1971 ad in Modern Photography . . .

But of course it didn't help when Kodak started using the phrase "scanner friendly" in their new film releases but did not provide a scanning standard - especially for color negatives . . .

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My eyes see a frowny face....

I realize I’m late to this discussion, been busy...

I do have a few thoughts though....

1) the internet is the worlds greatest source on confirmation bias.
2) 400H is fairly accurate if shot, processed, and scanned reasonably.
3) most 400H scans you see online are the result of 400H falling victim to film hipsters pushing an aesthetic. It’s very popular with wedding photographers for this reason.
4) with an appropriate toolset, you can make any image look like anything, given time and energy.

pentaxuser said:

Les is there any evidence for those claims about Japanese eyes and the reason ( matching pearls) and if so where might it be found.

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Maybe, but likely it will be in Japanese traditions . . .
At least they list some reasoning for it unlike Kodak's blanket statement of "scanner friendly".

Adrian Bacon said:

My eyes see a frowny face....
4) with an appropriate toolset, you can make any image look like anything, given time and energy.

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I agree and probably to a great extent.
However, to Bormental's point before, once scanned, things get clipped. For instance these results from the same frame of a seemingly well exposed Kodak Gold 100 using fully automatic scans from my Coolscan vs a minilab Noritsu has proven very hard for me to match them in post.



Like you said, there are those who may find one or the other more "real" or pleasing and come away with the impression one is correct if they never had a second opinion.

Quick update. As I have switched from home scanner and labs to DSLR scanning, I was able to examine CMY (RGB) layers of this film in more detail. It has a very unusual relationship between Green and Blue channels right after inverting, they're strangely close to each other. If you apply the typical correction (similar to Portra or Superia) the image indeed turns swampy, even the rebate will be dark green. This, I suspect, may be throwing off some auto-settings in lab scanners and makes it challenging for home scanning.

Anyway, correcting for this, I am getting quite likable images. These are all done at the same time/light. I like the outcome, as they're both accurate enough yet preserve the character of the enulsion:





Compare this scan to the original in the post #1:


I'll be using this film from time to time. I still believe its online presence is tainted by its unusual behavior, or perhaps it's my color inversion routine is unusual? Or perhaps the lab didn't do a good job developing it? Anyway, the final results are quite to my liking, which is all that matters. Took me a while to figure this one out, thank you everyone who contributed.

Yeah, that seems to be shaping up quite nicely. I think what matters most is that you're finding a way to work with this material that works well for you.

Personally I still intend to get a few rolls to RA4 print some negatives from it. I have a feeling I might very much like this film.

Bormental said:

Quick update. As I have switched from home scanner and labs to DSLR scanning, I was able to examine CMY (RGB) layers of this film in more detail. It has a very unusual relationship between Green and Blue channels right after inverting, they're strangely close to each other. If you apply the typical correction (similar to Portra or Superia) the image indeed turns swampy, even the rebate will be dark green. This, I suspect, may be throwing off some auto-settings in lab scanners and makes it challenging for home scanning.

Anyway, correcting for this, I am getting quite likable images. These are all done at the same time/light. I like the outcome, as they're both accurate enough yet preserve the character of the enulsion:

View attachment 255560

View attachment 255561

Compare this scan to the original in the post #1:
View attachment 255562

I'll be using this film from time to time. I still believe its online presence is tainted by its unusual behavior, or perhaps it's my color inversion routine is unusual? Or perhaps the lab didn't do a good job developing it? Anyway, the final results are quite to my liking, which is all that matters. Took me a while to figure this one out, thank you everyone who contributed.

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Yes that's quite a difference. Note; British understatement. While I was typing this the wife looked over my shoulder and said: That green reminds me of your colour after you were on the four masted schooner on that "round the horn at a bargain price cruise"

pentaxuser

Les Sarile said:

Coolscan vs a minilab Noritsu

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This is a perfect example of the Noritsu attempting to compensate for a surfeit of magenta in the scene by pushing the scanned image towards green. There is a control for this tucked deep away within the Noritsu sub-menus ("Color Failure") but it's quite esoteric and unintuitive to tinker with. I'd imagine the vast majority of Noritsus are on the default setting.

That's why a good lab needs a skilled scanner operator: a human looking at the scans and making decisions. In this case a good few clicks of the "minus magenta" button in the scanning software interface would bring the shot back into range.

Left to its own devices a minilab scanner will spit out shots that are generally pleasing most of the time. But when it goes wrong it goes very, very wrong. So in this case, I would guess that the lab fed the roll through the Noritsu on the default settings and just clicked through each frame without making any adjustments.

I also agree that it's possible to put "looks" on films in the minilab scanning process. The overexposed, pastel, wedding look (as noted) is popular and so some labs are actively trying to achieve this look by leaving a slight amount of overexposure and leaving in rosy and peachy tints that could otherwise be dialled out if colour and exposure accuracy was preferred.

LolaColor said:

This is a perfect example of the Noritsu attempting to compensate for a surfeit of magenta in the scene by pushing the scanned image towards green. There is a control for this tucked deep away within the Noritsu sub-menus ("Color Failure") but it's quite esoteric and unintuitive to tinker with. I'd imagine the vast majority of Noritsus are on the default setting.

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Yes - It's a pretty classic example of 'subject failure' - and as such, should be rejected as a comparison image. It's a problem that has existed since automatic colour printers appeared back at the dawn of colour neg film - they attempt to integrate everything to grey, and you can see the result...

Lachlan Young said:

Yes - It's a pretty classic example of 'subject failure' - and as such, should be rejected as a comparison image. It's a problem that has existed since automatic colour printers appeared back at the dawn of colour neg film - they attempt to integrate everything to grey, and you can see the result...

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I would reject it but I have a second opinion available. Unfortunately most others - specially newbies, don't have that option and wouldn't necessarilly know any better.
This was very common when Kodak Ektar 100 was first introduced as there were a lot of posts decrying the awful color results from it.
On the other hand, I've also seen other posts saying they like the weird results from it.

Les Sarile said:

This was very common when Kodak Ektar 100 was first introduced as there were a lot of posts decrying the awful color results from it.
On the other hand, I've also seen other posts saying they like the weird results from it.

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The problem with Ektar is that if it's overexposed, the crossover results in quite specific colour casts that get autocorrected into something that is aimed to deliver 'correct' skin tones, no matter what happens elsewhere in the scene. A colour inversion approach that aims to follow the model of RA4 printing can really show just how unpleasant overexposed Ektar can be. Correctly exposed Ektar with attention paid to the highlight values at time of exposure is more like an extended range Ektachrome.

Lachlan Young said:

The problem with Ektar is that if it's overexposed, the crossover results in quite specific colour casts that get autocorrected into something that is aimed to deliver 'correct' skin tones, no matter what happens elsewhere in the scene.

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Do you have examples that show this for Ektar 100?

Les Sarile said:

Do you have examples that show this for Ektar 100?

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Yes, but I'd need to go for a dig on a hard drive. Most of the examples I've found are clients work & I can't post those for obvious reasons.

It's the blue curve that has quite a strong upsweep just beyond where you'd end up with a bit of overexposure.