GREAT RESULTS WITH KODAK EKTAR 100: balanced colors, wide latitude, super fine grain

wogster · Oct 6, 2012

heterolysis said:
Completely agree. I've used it in 135 and 120, but any shots I have taken in daylight looked awful. I wouldn't say I'm a big fan of Ektar, but I could see its merit if you took the time to get really familiar with it.

Here are two shots of my dog on very overcast days (ah, winter in Vancouver). The red in my dog's fur is not accurately captured, and things aren't this blue in real life, but that seems to be common for this film. Shot on Nikon F80 / 50mm f/1,8, scanned Epson V500 1200dpi (these are the compressed jpegs, the actual files are on a different HDD). No photoshop, etc.

View attachment 58133

View attachment 58134

How do you know it's the film? It could be your scanner, it could be your monitor, it could be the software rendering the image, it could be your video card driver, it's not always the film that is at fault. The best you can do is make an optical print, if you can't remove a cast in an optical print with a reasonable filtration, then blame the film. The best thing you can do, if you need it on the computer, is use the white balance feature in software and pick something white to balance on. If it can't correct the cast without making something else look weird, then blame the film.

Bernard_61 · Oct 6, 2012

Theese scans of that poor too cyan-too red dog are just weird garbage, technically speaking

nworth · Oct 6, 2012

batwister said:
It's nothing like Velvia 50, which has around 4 and a half stops - normal contrast - and more naturalistic & rich colour. I have a few shots in my APUG gallery which weren't scanned, but photographed on a light box with a DSLR. Even with this idiosyncratic workflow, I haven't had any problems processing Ektar negs for reference purposes and uploading to the web. Every problem with this film, without exception, seems to come down to people's laziness with processing. You HAVE to do some colour correction, but this is the creative side of colour work. If you want instant, lifeless results for Flickr, shoot digital. You don't need a drum scanner to see that this film, like all others, is indeed made up of grain and relatively neutral colour. Nothing has been revealed to me with the 3,000,000 DPI scan in the OP, other than this person's disposition relating to photography. If you're promoting a cheap drum scanning service however, sign me up!

That it isn't as 'malleable' as other colour films (at least where scanning is concerned) does appear to represent certain emulsion compromises, but all this 'Ektar is shite' hysteria online seems just an excuse to whine about the demise of film. Live with it or shoot digital. It's a unique film best suited to creative photographers, not number crunching.

Velvia 50 was the closest thing I could think of to describe the mind set needed to work with Ektar. It certainly does have a broader latitude and less contrast than that film, and it does not display some of Velvia's nastier behaviors to broad lighting ranges or incorrect exposure, although it does have limited exposure range and latitude. But it is still somewhat fussy, and it has a different character than Portra. For a mind used to the way Portra handles a scene, some real adjustment is needed. That brings up an interesting idea - I wonder how a good transparency shooter will handle this film, with its somewhat lesser contrast and somewhat broader range? Someone noted that Ektar is quite good a differentiating subtle hues that other negative films would not handle well. I can see that this indeed might be the case and could be useful in some situations. I find Ektar quite easy to scan. Some color adjustment is sometimes needed, but it is quite straightforward. I haven't made any darkroom prints from Ektar, but I wouldn't expect any surprises. So far, my experience with Ektar is limited to about 8 rolls. I know of some places where I think I would like to shoot it to use its unique characteristics, but mostly I think I'll stick to Portra for the moment.

Les Sarile · Oct 6, 2012

Bernard_61 said:
The link above using "lily" as password shows just quite bad amateur scans; they're bad and casted scans from optically good shots.

Since I happen to know that you would not know what that shot would look like optically - first hand, evidence would suggest you have quite a few things out of whack to lead you to that conclusion.

Andre Noble · Oct 6, 2012

I tried to fix the doggie:

heterolysis · Oct 7, 2012

wogster said:
How do you know it's the film? It could be your scanner, it could be your monitor, it could be the software rendering the image, it could be your video card driver, it's not always the film that is at fault. The best you can do is make an optical print, if you can't remove a cast in an optical print with a reasonable filtration, then blame the film. The best thing you can do, if you need it on the computer, is use the white balance feature in software and pick something white to balance on. If it can't correct the cast without making something else look weird, then blame the film.

I could also be colour blind. I realize that there are well-known issues regarding the scanning of Ektar and getting an accurate colour profile, and it was not my intent to dwell on such issues. Can I colour correct the scans? Yes. Could I have used a good warming filter so that I didn't need to? Maybe. Could I filter it for an optical print? Probably---I don't have the capacity to print colour right now, so I can't know for sure. Hopefully someday.

I never said that the colour was beyond saving, I was simply stating that from my experiences, Ektar is better in low light. I have shot it in all sorts of lighting, including in studio, and that's how I feel.
The scans always come out blue---c'est la vie---but first and foremost, my point was that I don't like using Ektar in daylight situations.

That said, being new here I didn't know if it was kosher to fiddle with the curves of a scan before posting a sample. I thought I had done my due diligence by admitting I knew they were off beforehand. Because, going back to the "lily" photos, you can tell right off that the photographer upped the yellow in the shot of the train in order to get the railings so vibrant, and it becomes very apparent in the grass as well as, as others pointed out, the sky. As that was such a contentious issue, I didn't want to play that blame game and just uploaded 'raw' samples.

Here is a sample with, as far as my eyes, monitor and video card are concerned, his fur being its true colour.

I never said Ektar was terrible, and that was not my intention. Aside from daylight use, I personally think it has a lot of potential---great contrast and no 'grain'---and just wanted to point out a few issues I've had with it. Apologies if this was a bit of a rant, and I mean no offense by it, but I just wanted to clarify my position.

Andre Noble · Oct 7, 2012

Are you sure he doesn't look more like this:

Bernard_61 · Oct 7, 2012

Guys, because of your technique is so weak you should ask a very professional photolab to make scientific tests for you (I mean optical prints from different c-films on the same paper, after shooting the same subject with the same camera and lens using the films that you're going to test).

Anything else is just an amateur blablablabla....

batwister · Oct 7, 2012

Bernard_61 said:
Guys, because of your technique is so weak you should ask a very professional photolab to make scientific tests for you...

Agree. Either that or actually try spending time with colour photographs in books. You HAVE to look at photographs to develop a sensitivity to photographic colour. Your memory of the colour in the scene isn't enough because our brains process natural colour (light) and rendered colour very differently. If you have any well reproduced books, try looking at them just before editing one of your own photographs. That part of your brain really does need to be engaged sometimes. Landscapes are good for this because the photographer tends to strive for naturalistic results working with a broader spectrum of colour than a portraitist or... pet photographer. If you're editing on a computer, try stepping outside, looking around, then come back to the monitor to see how easy it is to confuse colour. Working in colour is perceptually challenging. It's not that anybody is colour blind, but obvious that people haven't spent much time seeing photographically, in colour.

There isn't any sense of control or neutrality in the images posted here. They feel like experiments without reference.

wogster · Oct 7, 2012

heterolysis said:
I could also be colour blind. I realize that there are well-known issues regarding the scanning of Ektar and getting an accurate colour profile, and it was not my intent to dwell on such issues. Can I colour correct the scans? Yes. Could I have used a good warming filter so that I didn't need to? Maybe. Could I filter it for an optical print? Probably---I don't have the capacity to print colour right now, so I can't know for sure. Hopefully someday.

I never said that the colour was beyond saving, I was simply stating that from my experiences, Ektar is better in low light. I have shot it in all sorts of lighting, including in studio, and that's how I feel.
The scans always come out blue---c'est la vie---but first and foremost, my point was that I don't like using Ektar in daylight situations.

That said, being new here I didn't know if it was kosher to fiddle with the curves of a scan before posting a sample. I thought I had done my due diligence by admitting I knew they were off beforehand. Because, going back to the "lily" photos, you can tell right off that the photographer upped the yellow in the shot of the train in order to get the railings so vibrant, and it becomes very apparent in the grass as well as, as others pointed out, the sky. As that was such a contentious issue, I didn't want to play that blame game and just uploaded 'raw' samples.

Here is a sample with, as far as my eyes, monitor and video card are concerned, his fur being its true colour.

View attachment 58171

I never said Ektar was terrible, and that was not my intention. Aside from daylight use, I personally think it has a lot of potential---great contrast and no 'grain'---and just wanted to point out a few issues I've had with it. Apologies if this was a bit of a rant, and I mean no offense by it, but I just wanted to clarify my position.

I'm just sayin' a lot of people do a raw scan and if the colour isn't perfect they blame the film, rather then realizing that like optical printing, you need to colour correct the image before digital viewing/printing. One of the best ways to do this, and your dog allows for it, we know the kerchief is white and red, so if we white balance on the white part, we should get the other colours to come along, close enough. Barring the fact that no two films see colour exactly the same way, in fact two batches of the same film will see colour slightly differently, no two papers see colour the same way, no two scanners see colour the same way, no two printers see colour the same way, no two monitors see colour the same way. The closest we can come is, is the colour on the print or screen close enough to seem a reasonable facsimile of the original scene, given the fact it will never be exact. Even though there are people who worship digital capture, it's not going to be 100% exact either, no two sensors, unless from the same wafer, will see colour exactly the same, and they will not be 100% accurate either. This is probably why I often shoot colour for B&W, in other words, I use a colour film or d*****l camera, then in post processing, convert to B&W using the computer.

Diapositivo · Oct 7, 2012

heterolysis said:
That said, being new here I didn't know if it was kosher to fiddle with the curves of a scan before posting a sample. I thought I had done my due diligence by admitting I knew they were off beforehand. Because, going back to the "lily" photos, you can tell right off that the photographer upped the yellow in the shot of the train in order to get the railings so vibrant, and it becomes very apparent in the grass as well as, as others pointed out, the sky. As that was such a contentious issue, I didn't want to play that blame game and just uploaded 'raw' samples.

The problem is that a negative scan can never be output "raw" (that would be negative). The process of inverting the masked negative always inescapably involves some filtering somewhere in the process. When one posts a scan as it comes out "right out of the scanner" or "right out of photoshop" etc. there always is some sort of filtering applied. Software involved in the process tries to filter out the orange mask (but not all orange masks are equal) and tries to white balance the image by applying some strategy, typically assuming that there is some white in the image, make the most quasi-neutral patch properly neutral, and hope that the rest of the colours falls in the right place.

This strategy most often fails because the quasi-neutral was not neutral at all, or it was white or grey but it was quasi-neutral and bringing it to neutral sets a cast on the image (asphalt is not neutral, and even white cars are not neutral etc), or because the neutral patch was in the wrong place (white car in shade, rest of the scene in sun light) or because the white patch was tinted by a coloured reflection (white card hit by green reflection from the grass) and probably many other reasons.

You can see it with the dog scans. Although the images were probably taken at short time interval and in the same light conditions the "raw" filtering of the two images is evidently different. The first is probably skewed toward red-magenta and the second toward yellow or green or cyan. That means two different filtrations have been applied by some layer of software, as the film, no doubt, is the same.

So at the end of the day there is no such a thing as a "raw" negative scan. The scan as it comes out of the scanner is normally quite wrong (if there is no proper colour management involving scanner, film and monitor profiling). People post all over Flicker these raw scans and scream that the film is not good. Or they say it's good and the scan screams it is not. And the same scan is seen differently by different people in any case.

Add to that several other layers of imprecision (lack of scanner calibration, lack of monitor calibration, lack of indication of reference space such as sRGB or AdobeRGB) and the final result on monitors is a fair of random colour casts.

And we cannot discuss what could be addressed because, you know, it is taboo on this site.

So my word of wisdom is: any attempt to appreciate the colour rendition of any colour negative film with a non-colour-managed workflow is moot.
And also my intervention in this thread is moot because we cannot talk hybrid technology here.

APUG is destined to forever host threads of people complaining about the colour rendition of their scan (Ektar or whatever) or praising a colour negative instead of another by posting, again, negative scans with "random" filtration.

I have to absolutely make a decision and observe it to never any more intervene in threads discussing colour rendition on APUG.

wogster · Oct 7, 2012

Diapositivo said:
The problem is that a negative scan can never be output "raw" (that would be negative). The process of inverting the masked negative always inescapably involves some filtering somewhere in the process. When one posts a scan as it comes out "right out of the scanner" or "right out of photoshop" etc. there always is some sort of filtering applied. Software involved in the process tries to filter out the orange mask (but not all orange masks are equal) and tries to white balance the image by applying some strategy, typically assuming that there is some white in the image, make the most quasi-neutral patch properly neutral, and hope that the rest of the colours falls in the right place.

This strategy most often fails because the quasi-neutral was not neutral at all, or it was white or grey but it was quasi-neutral and bringing it to neutral sets a cast on the image (asphalt is not neutral, and even white cars are not neutral etc), or because the neutral patch was in the wrong place (white car in shade, rest of the scene in sun light) or because the white patch was tinted by a coloured reflection (white card hit by green reflection from the grass) and probably many other reasons.

You can see it with the dog scans. Although the images were probably taken at short time interval and in the same light conditions the "raw" filtering of the two images is evidently different. The first is probably skewed toward red-magenta and the second toward yellow or green or cyan. That means two different filtrations have been applied by some layer of software, as the film, no doubt, is the same.

So at the end of the day there is no such a thing as a "raw" negative scan. The scan as it comes out of the scanner is normally quite wrong (if there is no proper colour management involving scanner, film and monitor profiling). People post all over Flicker these raw scans and scream that the film is not good. Or they say it's good and the scan screams it is not. And the same scan is seen differently by different people in any case.

Add to that several other layers of imprecision (lack of scanner calibration, lack of monitor calibration, lack of indication of reference space such as sRGB or AdobeRGB) and the final result on monitors is a fair of random colour casts.

And we cannot discuss what could be addressed because, you know, it is taboo on this site.

So my word of wisdom is: any attempt to appreciate the colour rendition of any colour negative film with a non-colour-managed workflow is moot.
And also my intervention in this thread is moot because we cannot talk hybrid technology here.

APUG is destined to forever host threads of people complaining about the colour rendition of their scan (Ektar or whatever) or praising a colour negative instead of another by posting, again, negative scans with "random" filtration.

I have to absolutely make a decision and observe it to never any more intervene in threads discussing colour rendition on APUG.

I think you are right, what comes out of the scanner is most likely wrong, unless it has all been calibrated. There are three steps to this:

1) Calibrate the scanner.
2) Calibrate the monitor
3) Calibrate the film.

To calibrate the film, is easy, take a blank piece of film, say the piece before the first image, this is usually unexposed. This should appear in a scan as white, since there is no image. You colour correct this to get white. Now if you scan a negative using the same correction, it should come out right, if it does not, then it's the colour attributes of the film that are inaccurate.

Without doing all of these steps, you can't say for certain whether incorrect colour is the film or the scanning process.

Diapositivo · Oct 7, 2012

Absolutely yes.

Calibrate the film with the "lock film base" method is a first attempt but, as far as I know, it's not optimal, and that is if I get it right because the orange mask is not uniform (like an orange filter) and does not affect all image zones in the same way.

The method I know - but that I still have to put into practice - is actually to take a picture of a IT 8.7 (ISO 12641) calibration target and then pass this image, together with the reference file given with the target, to an application that creates a profile.

Actually the standard method would call for the use of a reflective calibration target, but I plan to use a transparent calibration target as I think it should give the same results (and it is easier to set up).

So my plan is to buy a slide duplicator, put a slide IT8 2.7 target on it, take a picture of it with a negative film, let's say Rollei CN200, develop the film, scan the image, than use this image for the "film calibration process" and obtaining a film profile, then carefully inspect my workflow so that the film profile is honoured (not stripped and not ignored) in every stage of the workflow.

An explanation of one such method is given here:

http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc18.htm#topic15

Another important requisite is that all the workflow (scanner, post-processing software, monitor) use and honour ICC profiles or the entire pain will have been moot*.

That means that APUG readers are supposed to have calibrated monitors and to have browsers which (are configured to) honour ICC profiles!

http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html#

* As the gballard site explains, the de facto standard colour space being sRGB, an image without ICC profile can be seen by all "exactly" if the browser considers any web image as being in the sRGB colour space AND also converts it to your monitor profile. So ICC profiles can be absent from web images provided that the images are sRGB and that monitors are calibrated at both ends.

DREW WILEY · Oct 8, 2012

A lot of garbage-in/garbage-out shoot-from-the-hip testing mentality here. Exactly the kind of thing which tells one next to nothing relevant about the film itself.

Andy K · Oct 8, 2012

Just out of curiosity, why is scanning being discussed on APUG?

DREW WILEY · Oct 8, 2012

Roadkill at the time of exposure is still roadkill. Putting it in a food processor (scanner) isn't going to
make it any better. It's still roadkill. I wonder how many folks even know how to do an OBJECTIVE
film test for color in the first place.

wogster · Oct 8, 2012

Andy K said:
Just out of curiosity, why is scanning being discussed on APUG?

When someone says the film is producing lousy colours, and they are going from a specific technology, then it's questionable whether it's the film, or something else in the work flow. You then need to verify that the work flow is correct. That's really all that is being done here. Some scanning discussion is valid, because there is no possible way to take an analog negative, slide or print, and make it available here for sharing without scanning.

BradS · Oct 8, 2012

Andy K said:
Just out of curiosity, why is scanning being discussed on APUG?

I was wondering the same thing Andy. Ten pages of scanning discussion....this crap make me want to vomit.

DREW WILEY · Oct 8, 2012

I think the mention of scanning is relevant for the simple reason that nowadays more newcomers are going to scan and inkjet print Ektar than actually print it analog, and I hate in any manner to discourage new film purchases, that is, if we really want color film to stay alive. Of course, I wish
more folks would try to print it the traditional way in the dkrm, but not everyone has the facilities to
do so. That being said, this particular venue should not be used to teach the basics of scanning.
Maybe patching up a chuck hole here and there ... which is a lot better than ignorantly badmouthing
a film and discouraging potential new purchasers in that manner.

Diapositivo · Oct 8, 2012

BradS said:
I was wondering the same thing Andy. Ten pages of scanning discussion....this crap make me want to vomit.

Man you should read the entire thread again. This is not a discussion about scanning. This is a discussion about Kodak Ektar.

Bernard_61 · Oct 9, 2012

Nowadays photographers need an improved scanning technique for keeping color film alive. Digital is raising the bar (his bar) of colour accuracy etc. Analog photography should be more flexible and technically flawless to survive.

So film and scanner are "allies among enemies".

Andy K · Oct 9, 2012

Bernard_61 said:
Nowadays photographers need an improved scanning technique for keeping color film alive. Digital is raising the bar (his bar) of colour accuracy etc. Analog photography should be more flexible and technically flawless to survive.

So film and scanner are "allies among enemies".

Perhaps those discussing this digital technique missed this on APUG's front page on their way in:

Welcome to the Analog Photography Users Group,Founded 2002

APUG.ORG is an international community of like minded individuals devoted to traditional (non-digital) photographic processes. We are an active photographic community; our forums contain a highly detailed archive of traditional and historic photographic processes.

APUG is for discussion of analogue photography and processes. Scanning is a digital process and has no place on APUG. If people want to discuss scanning there are millions of digital sites they can go to. There is only one APUG.

xenophon · Oct 9, 2012

Please don't patronize the hybrids! I would NOT be able to afford (money and time-wise) analog photography if it wasn't for the shoot-process-scan workflow.

I consider myself an analog photographer, though it's been 35+ years since I did any tray-processing.

Please consider this viewpoint! The thread, as is, provides valuable insight to all!

Diapositivo · Oct 9, 2012

The fact is that we cannot discuss the property of any colour material (film, paper, process) on the internet and "back" it with concrete examples without a proper understanding of scanning tecnique. The point of contact between analogue photography and an internet forum inevitably is a scanner.

If this was a pub conversation of photography passionate people dedicated to analogue photography I would understand scanning to be considered off-topic. But this is an internet conversion between people discussing analogue photography and placing scans on the thread (or on the gallery site) and it is all too natural, if we want to discuss Ektar qualities, to discuss scanning technique to "depurate" it from the result shown to be able to judge Ektar.

It's as if people would discuss here the sharpness of a print shown through a dirty glass without other people being able to raise the point of the dirty glass because the site is not about glass cleaning. The glass is there between you and the print and it is never irrelevant in the discussion.

JoJo · Oct 9, 2012

DREW WILEY said:
I wonder how many folks even know how to do an OBJECTIVE film test for color in the first place.

Drew, maybe you could tell people like me a bit more?
You wrote: "Folks should just study the tech sheets and learn how to correctly interpret them". When I compare tech sheets of Ektar and for example Portra, I see differences in the curves. But what exactly is this telling me for practical work? Do you look into the tech sheet and say "oh, I must do this and that to get the result I want", just by watching the curves?
It would be great for a "Greenhorn" like me to know more. I do color printig since 2 years only and I am far away to be experienced. I got very good results with Ektar, but on the other side, I also got very bad results depending on the light conditions. It would be interesting for me to learn how to handle this.
Numer of people doing analog color printig is low, so who should I ask?

Guys, please open another thread "how to scan Ektar and calibrate scanning equipment".

Joachim

GREAT RESULTS WITH KODAK EKTAR 100: balanced colors, wide latitude, super fine grain

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