Agreed. Especially in brightly lit scenes. It and its cousin 400H also have heavier grain than the Portra equivalents, which is the main reason I've used them much less.
For my opinion the FUJI 160NS is a little more contrasting and saturated than the Portra 160
I really prefer Ektar 100 for outdoor hues. But for portraiture, Portra 160 would be my first choice, followed by Portra 400 if I needed more speed, like for handheld shooting (I never use flash). It's an excellent compromise film with good skintones. But I rarely do color portraits anymore. Both of these Portras are slightly warm balanced, just like most traditional color neg films. Fuji versions, in my opinion, are a little better balanced to Asian skintones, which shouldn't be surprising.
I like Portra 160 and 400 for contrasty outdoor moments (no portraits)... but as a result of the warm balance sky tones tend to get cyan tinted.
That's odd. I find Ektar has a tendency to do this more than either Portra emulsion, if the sky is too brightly exposed. A grad filter or a polariser can help to counteract the effect, if their use is appropriate for the scene.
A useful person to know.Matt. Any chance that the next time you see her you can ask her to do a sales projection for Photrio members interested in the likely effects of the forthcoming Kodak film price increases?No.
Besides the modelling work, she also had a day job - a mathematician specializing in statistical projections for industry!
Btw, Portra 160 is exposed @ EI 100, the 400 @ EI 250. 120 film.
Most of her work was, IIRC, being used by the pharmaceutical industry.A useful person to know.Matt. Any chance that the next time you see her you can ask her to do a sales projection for Photrio members interested in the likely effects of the forthcoming Kodak film price increases?
pentaxuser
...
Portra films are warm-balanced in the shadows by actually creating "fleshtone" crossover, which might be beneficial for portraits (after all, that's what "Portra" stands for); but that same fact means closely related natural hues will not be well differentiated and will automatically be muddied somewhat, though not as badly as most older color neg films. That applies to 400 Portra too. I miss former Portra 160 VC, which was a nice compromise.
Hmm, it is most obvius in brighter parts of blue sky...
Btw, Portra 160 is exposed @ EI 100, the 400 @ EI 250. 120 film.
What meter are you using - and what are you taking your reading from?
YupAlso, anyone who is stating that the Portra films are 'pastel' has a very strange idea of what 'pastel' means (or whoever is doing the scanning is terrible at their job). If you are getting less saturated colour from Portra 400 than from 160, you are doing something very, very wrong.
Hi Lachlan,What meter are you using - and what are you taking your reading from?
Also, anyone who is stating that the Portra films are 'pastel' has a very strange idea of what 'pastel' means (or whoever is doing the scanning is terrible at their job). If you are getting less saturated colour from Portra 400 than from 160, you are doing something very, very wrong.
metering with the Sekonic
a Gossen Profisix (Luna Pro SBC in the US) mostly in reflective mode, no spotmeter.
I like shadows best at +2/3 EI...
Try taking an incident reading from your own shadow at a stop above box speed and see how it compares. That is likely to be much closer to a reasonably correct shadow keyed exposure.
However, what I have seen time & again is that minilab scanner presets often inherently chop off (and then try to synthesise back in) the inherent characteristics of many films to make it harder for the operator to mess things up too thoroughly - or people unquestioningly accept the shoddy results most scanner software presents as an inversion. Getting the colour space correct at the inversion step also matters. Portra is massively more colourful than the professional films of the VPS etc generation.
Jens - CC filters are rarely used anymore with respect to color film. But warming and cooling filters relative to exposure color temperature, as well as UV filters, are still valuable, indeed essential if you want Ektar to behave. Once crossover occurs, it's very difficult to post-correct. If people tell you they can correct "anything" in PS, that's like an alleged chef telling you he can salvage any dish using a microwave oven a week later; but the taste simply won't be the same.
For Ektar I always have along a 2B Skylight filter for minor corrections, and either a KR1.5 or 81A amber warming filter for bluish overcast conditions. Correcting deep blue shadows under an open blue sky, especially at high altitude, requires even stronger warming, like an 81C. Split lighting, with part of the scene in deep blue shade, and some under open sun, is a more complex problem requiring a longer answer.
Porta films generally do not need the same kind of corrective warming filtration because it's kinda built-in. But that comes with the penalty of less neutrality of color. And I personally dislike the pinkish-orangish exaggerated Caucasian skintones of amateur color neg films like Kodak Gold. Portra 400 isn't quite as bad, but the effect is still there. But with all of them, green reproduction suffers as a result, and so too does decent differentiation between yellows, gold, oranges, warm tans,etc - those tend to get dumped right into the same generic bucket of "skintones". Ektar is distinctly better in that respect, but has its own problem with getting blue and cyan confused.
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