How much the a film's "characteristics" are preserved?

This is a long standing question I've had with film and I've only shot one or two stocks of film, done darkroom prints and stuck with that so I'm lacking knowledge but with so much variability in processing and scanning, how much of a films characteristics are preserved? For example, Kodak Portra advertises: "Kodak's Professional Portra 400 is a high-speed daylight-balanced color negative film offering a smooth and natural color palette that is balanced with vivid saturation and low contrast for accurate skin tones and consistent results."

Let's take skin tones, won't these "accurate" skin tones look slightly different depending on the scanner you use, which lab you take your film to, as well as the post processing that your scanner does on the negative to make it a positive or even if it's a traditional darkroom print?

How consistent can you get with shooting film and expecting the film to render colors in a certain way when there is so much variability in the post processing of a film?

mehguy said:

Let's take skin tones, won't these "accurate" skin tones look slightly different depending on the scanner you use, which lab you take your film to, as well as the post processing that your scanner does on the negative to make it a positive or even if it's a traditional darkroom print?

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C-41 process is the same regardless of the lab you send it to. Very few companies make C 41 chemicals, Kodak and Fuji are or were the main two. Scanning may have more effect on the look of a film but a scanner cannot add color that is not on the film, detail not on the film, and similar. Saturation and hue can be affected just like filtration in wet printing can be adjusted to change or correct for some degree of incorrect exposure or lighting.

B&W has many different developers which can or do affect the results one gets from a given emulsion.

mehguy said:

Let's take skin tones, won't these "accurate" skin tones look slightly different depending on the scanner you use, which lab you take your film to, as well as the post processing that your scanner does on the negative to make it a positive or even if it's a traditional darkroom print?

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You'll get variation too from different papers, enlargers, chemicals - but the strength of a darkroom print is that if your process is reasonably on target, you are essentially guided in towards a 'correct' neutrality for the balance of that emulsion - with scanning, you have to do that much of that yourself by hand, because much of the software is either written by people with limited understanding of the role of the mask in CN film, or on the basis of integration to grey (which can fail quite spectacularly). The software for the Fuji Frontier minilab is geared towards fitting the image on to a specific paper, with some quite strong corrections that may not respect the balance of the negative if printed in a darkroom, but which are intended to make it look 'right' in terms of skin tone. You can manually make a scan behave as it would if darkroom printed (and automate it to an extent) relatively easily - it's mainly to do with removing the mask correctly.

Lachlan Young said:

it's mainly to do with removing the mask correctly.

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I expect that the inversion process is quite critical as well.

MattKing said:

I expect that the inversion process is quite critical as well.

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If the mask removal is done first, then the inversion and colour correction steps are straightforward and pretty linear.

the mask is intregal to the film. while the printing filtration corects for the mask, it is not removed.

Once you leave the world of analog, I think a film's "characteristics" get redefined. If I hold a color print up next to my monitor, I can make *some* comparisons. But the two different media are fundamentally different in contrast, brightness, and texture; one is reflected light, the other transmitted; etc. So as long as the image exists on my computer monitor, it has a different set charactersitics than it does in the analog world.

For me to compare the scanned image to the print, it would first be necessary to print the scanned image on paper. This introduces a new set of variables and requires new skills, but I think it would be necessary for a meaningful comparison.

My theory is (and this is just a guess) is that if an analog print was made from the negative - and if the person who is postprocessing the digital scan of that negative could see that print and use it as a guide when editing and printing - then the resulting print from the scan might exhibit some of (or possibly, much of) the film's analog characteristics. I suppose, if a person has a great deal of experience making analog prints from a certain negative stock, then they might be able reproduce the film's characteristic look without needing an analog print to work from.

But my point is, unless a skilled person is actively working towards the goal of preserving a film's characteristics, then it is unlikely to happen, either automatically, or by chance. None of the few different image editors, plugins, and scanning softwares I have used are very good at automatically producing consistant results. They all require at least some further editing in something like Lightroom or Photoshop. And those adjustments can either preserve or destroy the film's characteristics, depending on the goals and skills of the operator.

cmacd123 said:

the mask is intregal to the film. while the printing filtration corects for the mask, it is not removed.

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OK, poor choice of words on my part, essentially it's 'making the scan behave as if in a darkroom' which essentially means the right kind of colour correction for the mask, allowing it to do its job.

There is no "perfect" C-41 film. All films make compromises in one aspect or another, and are often optimized for certain situations. The scanning process should be able to reproduce this look. On the other hand, scanning software frequently uses algorithms to "correct" these errors or compromises and make different films look alike.

The classic comparison would be something like Fuji 400H vs Portra 400. Same speed film, but the Fuji is going to emphasize the greens and blues a bit more, the Portra is going to emphasize the warmer tones, as a rule.

Certainly, if you're really good at fiddling with color channels, you can make them look identical-- for that matter, with a bit of effort, you can make them both look like a lovely spool of FP4+.

But you're going to have to work at it-- doing "normal" scanning (Correct the color cast, equalize out the histogram, set the white balance), they'll produce different interpretations of the same scene.