Kodak Ektar 100 - Is This a Bad Joke from Kodak?

RPC said:

I don't scan, but optically print my negatives and I have never had any of the problems with Ektar that people complain about, no blue in the shadows, no cyan cast, etc. So I believe scanning must be causing a lot of the problems users have.

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Maybe i am wrong, but i feel that Ektar is giving a warming effect over another films, i have a feeling that slides are more cooler side and color negs are more at worming sides, i could be wrong.

Well, so far Ektar was my best fav color film until i used Reala and Portra 160/400, but i will still use Ektar if i want, still one nice color neg from Kodak, Fuji are not supporting their products for longer run so i have to have another options, I was planning to try cross-processing Ektar once and see.

akaa said:

RPC said:

I don't scan, but optically print my negatives and I have never had any of the problems with Ektar that people complain about, no blue in the shadows, no cyan cast, etc. So I believe scanning must be causing a lot of the problems users have. I have been using films for over 30 years and it is not a poorly designed film. I would not use it where good skin tones are important due to its higher saturation but when vivid colors are desired it does well when exposed and printed properly.

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David A. Goldfarb said:

As the conversation moves to scanning equipment and technique, it should move to our sister site, DPUG.org. If someone wants to create a thread on DPUG about scanning Ektar 100 it may be linked here in this thread.

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This would be an excellent thread for DPUG and would make DPUG a better place to search for scanning solutions.

Steve

I found Ektar 100 much easier to scan once SilverFast added a NegaFix profile for it. Otherwise you're going to need some color curves.

No problems with color since I have nailed a workflow for Ektar 100:

"raw" scan with Vuescan (I am using a Nikon Coolscan) followed by a positive conversion in ColorPerfect, which has very good film profiles:

Untitled von kanzlr auf Flickr

Going to put in my 2 cents here. I just shot a roll of Ektar, and noticed the same cyan cast when scanning as a negative. However, if you take a look at processed Ektar and compare it to other C-41 film, I think you will notice that the hue of the orange mask on the negative is significantly different from other films. I believe this is the source of your cyan cast since a generic negative scan has to make assumptions about the actual hue of the orange mask on the negative. In the case of Ektar, this assumption is probably off. Indeed, when I took a look at VueScan, I noticed it has a setting specifically for Ektar. Using this setting, gave better results, although still not great.

I am awaiting some new RA-4 printing paper so I can try wet printing my Ektar negatives. I anticipate much better results than I've had scanning. I also expect a significantly different filter pack than what I would use for Portra.

Like others here have said, I do not believe the problem is the film. I believe it is the scanning process and relying on the scanner to properly invert the negative.

Seems to me I recognise the tendency of ColorPerfect to clip highlights with the default values (post #56). Things improve if you set the value for "Highlights: Stops-range-clip" to a number which brings the numeric value to a small value such as 0.01.

I still see some cyan too much in the sky in my monitor. The good of Color Perfect is that you can filter it just like you would with an enlarger. Did you use ColorPerfect film profiles for Ektar?

If people simply shot Ektar and printed with the same care they routinely gave to a chrome film it would probably end all kinds of uninformed complaints. It's not an artificially warmed portrait film. You need skylight and warming correction filters under certain circumstances. If you're getting blue shadows under an open sky, that's because the shadows are blue! In terms of reproduction of certain hues in nature, this is the most accurate color neg film I've ever seen. But you have to know how to shoot and print it correctly. I'm using this film in multiple formats, right up to 8x10. One of the finest films Kodak has ever made, but not necessarily ideal for every kind of subject matter. No shoe size fits just every foot. That's why there are choices. Use Portra where it's appropriate, Ektar for certain other things.

Unlike a chrome film which you can simply slap on a lightbox and see what you got, way too many
folks are simply relating some inferior result they got from a half-assed scan, and are blaming the film
for something largely unrelated to the film itself. I enlarge it directly, so don't have to second guess
this kind of thing. Sure, there are certain things you need to do in the darkroom too to optimize the
quality of the print, just as has always been the case. But this primarily involves contrast reduction
or increase thru masking etc. The actual color response to the paper (I use Fuji CAII) is superb.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ektar&w=15230795@N03&z=e

There's a couple of digitized photos I've shot on the new Ektar 100. I don't see any color casts. Color on darkroom prints does not differ from those

The mask color has noting to do with any color cast in a negative film. The cyan color or cast reported by some may be due to a need for UV over the lens during shooting. Or, it may be bad scanning or bad processing or any number of user problems. Thousands of people are using it with no problem except for the dozen or so here on APUG. Soffy guys, but the pro reports seem to outweigh the con reports.

PE

Photo Engineer said:

The mask color has noting to do with any color cast in a negative film. The cyan color or cast reported by some may be due to a need for UV over the lens during shooting. Or, it may be bad scanning or bad processing or any number of user problems. Thousands of people are using it with no problem except for the dozen or so here on APUG. Soffy guys, but the pro reports seem to outweigh the con reports.

PE

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I think I've found a correlation between those using the Epson scanners and the cyan cast in Flickr examples. 90% of amateurs use these scanners and it must be down to a half-arsed workflow; "quick, must upload!"
The lack of a UV filter is interesting and I've always used one, without much problem with this film. And of course, shadows under blue skies are blueish, no surprises there. All basic stuff really!

There have been many superb examples of Ektar 100 posted in this thread. I think I need to shoot some more of this film... and have it processed at the lab in NYC where I take my transparency film as they do really nice work.

The problem resides in scanning and posting without doing the basics, which is:

Buying a target and profiling your scanner
http://www.targets.coloraid.de/

Buying a device to profile your monitor and profiling it every two weeks or so. An example:
http://www.datacolor.eu/en/products/display-calibration/spyder4express/index.html

Don't strip profiles from your JPEGs (don't use Photoshop "save for web", that is).

Those three simple actions will guarantee that what I see on my profiled monitor is very, very close to what you see on your profiled monitor.
Any other procedure results in a random colour cast.

It's as if anybody compared the results of their negatives while each one uses a different bath temperature during developing, and observed pictures under different light, and printed while "forgetting" some random filter on the enlarger head. It just makes no much sense.

(Sky in #56 on my monitor is unnaturally cyan. The sky is skyblue not skycyan ).

Photo Engineer said:

The mask color has noting to do with any color cast in a negative film. The cyan color or cast reported by some may be due to a need for UV over the lens during shooting. Or, it may be bad scanning or bad processing or any number of user problems. Thousands of people are using it with no problem except for the dozen or so here on APUG. Soffy guys, but the pro reports seem to outweigh the con reports.

PE

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Umm - well it certainly would account for it if the scanner's color negative invert operation doesn't properly compensate for it.

if you scan a color negative as a positive, take it into photoshop, and simply invert it, you will get a strongly cyan positive image. Just as in wet printing where you need to use a relatively strong Magenta+Yellow filter pack when printing, an scanner needs to apply a cyan correction when it scans a negative and converts it to a positive image.

My point here was that the color mask of Ektar looks quite different to me from other films, so a simple minded inversion in the scanner with an "average negative" -cyan correction comes out wrong because enough -cyan correction wasn't made.

This has nothing to do with the performance of the film - it's all about the scanning process.

Your WYSIWYG isn't my WYSIWYG

The simplistic approach is to assume scanning color negative file is exactly the same as printing to color paper. Is is NOT. Data generated by a scanner has a linear response and must be processed by the correct film profile information to produce the expected S curve response.

Then there is the issue of color monitor calibration. Monitors come in MANY flavors (CRT, LED,, etc) that have different color reproduction characteristics ; some monitors are calibrated, some are not; web browsers may also contribute to color errors; etc.

What you see on your screen is probably not exactly the same as what some other viewer sees.

To put it in analog terms, if you print a color negative on what ever color paper (and process) you have and send me the negative to print on my paper (and process), the chance that those two prints are EXACT matches is very small.

Apologies in advanced if this digital explanation offends any here, but the underlying issue in this thread is digital.

From the masking POV, this is a mask that is a positive image compatible with the negative image. The negative curves and speeds (if necessary) are adjusted as much as possible so that two color negative films can be printed on the same automatic printer with no big change in parameters (filter, time and slope).

As Fred says above, scanners must use a profile for each film, bud since Ektar is very similar to Portra, the same data can be used. In fact, I scan them both with the same profile. They seem to be fine to me, but so far I have only done electronic flash comparisons and these omit almost all UV which is a prime suspect.

Of course, bad processing may enter into this too.

But, the good seems to outweigh the bad.

PE

I belive its a trait of the film, but Scanning and film profiles definietly come into play IME. My first ever roll, they year it was introduced, had a terrible blue cast when scanned on my (then, top of the line) Minolta Scan Elite 5400 I. Shots were taken under a grey, heavy overcast Fall day, with no fill flash. So the color temperature was definitely cool, and Ektar exaggerated the blueness and introduced a blue cast to all images shot under this lighting - a problem I had never, ever encountered with any other Kodak negative film and had in fact only read about this phenomenon happening with Provia under similar conditions. However, when I took the same negatives to be scanned at a lab on a Noritsu, the images came out with perfect WB. The Noritsu appartently had a film profile, or much better algo for handling Ektar than the 5400 did. And it should, given it is a $25,000 scanner!
Nowadays, I have a Pakon (Kodak) f235+ minilab film scanner (a $12,000 scanner, way back in the day - 2004/5ish, only a grand nowadays), and it too scans Ektar well. At least, it does for flowers and sunsets, my main use for Ektar now.

I have a feeling that many people here have a serious misunderstanding (or a lack of understanding) of what color is, how color is formed, how it is perceived and how color imaging products work and how they are/should/could/can be used; and furthermore, what "color balance" is, and how there is no such a thing as "reality" or "reference" at all... (This very basic principle is true for B&W too -- there is no "real" or right contrast or curve shape.)

I think this lack of understanding (or rather, getting too obsessed of not understanding everything) is a reason why some people prefer only doing B/W photography. Digital photography is no different, and I bet many of those who have started using BW film after digital have had problems with color.

This is also why some people prefer slide films which (apparently) give fewer possibilities and are more fixed by nature (at least in the hands of most people).

I think Drew hit the nail; the fact that shadows indeed ARE blue IN REALITY, seems to come as a surprise to many people!

As well as the fact that the sky simply has no fixed color IN REALITY, not even near.

Do you take notes how the sky "feels like" when you shoot the image?

After all, photography starts from observations; it should be close to the art of painting in this regard. Camera and film is just a medium for this work. And the most everyday things can be hardest to observe.

And, it is not surprising that when color saturation and contrast are increased (which is exactly the POINT of using Ektar anyway), all natural phenomena w.r.t. color are exaggerated, too. Also, errors in color balancing are exaggerated.

There probably is much more going on than just this (for example, it is a real fact that the mask has a clearly different hue than Portra films, and it may have something to do with something), but we have to start from the really basics if we want to master the skill of color, and we don't need to get too technical for that.

hrst, you are opening a can of worms here. I would say that up to a certain extent I agree with you, but your "relativism" in colour seems a bit too extreme to me.

It is certainly true that shades have a true blue cast under a blue sky. It is certainly true that incandescent light "is" yellow (compared to sun light) and therefore the "white" wall lighted by the incadescent light "is" yellow (so that tungsten film is actually "cheating" in a sense). By the same token it is certainly true that buildings actually converge (visually) and applying perspective correction to make the walls parallel often make an unnatural effect. Human vision is complex and involves a lot of brain elaboration and sometimes we want to see things "as we imagine we see them" rather than "as we see them". And I agree with that.

But by Jove, the blue of the sky is always the same since I was a child and, I bet, in the few billions years before I was born. If you look above your head during central hours of the day and the sky is clear of any clouds you always see the same shade of blue ("blue" in photographic terms is actually a bit violet, but I digress). It goes without saying that approaching sunset the sky can pass through different shades of purple, yellow, red, orange etc but at noon the blue is always the same to my eyes.

I know that if you measure light temperature you might obtain different °K values but visually it's always basically the same it never ever falls toward cyan - turquoise.

So much so that the sky is a sure indicator that there is a filtration problem and this quite often occurs with negative films, because there's much bigger room for errors in inversion and filtration.

Although I am sure that a proper workflow should overcome many problems, I can testify that skyblue of my Astia is 100% of the time just spot on, a shade of blue which I immediately recognise as the right skyblue shade of light blue, while each of us can normally immediately spot an image taken with a negative film when the sky is present in the frame because the colour of the sky is not convincing and has something stale or stinking so to speak... Or I am the only one who spots scans from negative at first glance, when the sky is present?

I have read many times on this forum that negative film is in theory more precise in colour rendition than slides, but in practice 95% of the time that I see a negative scan the colours have something "stale" which is clearly visible when the sky is visible. I suppose this is because the sky gives us a fairly exact reference while the exact yellow or red colour of a flower is normally not known.

This seems to be explained by some forum participants with the theory that the slides have a pleasant, but not "exact" colours, while the negatives have a less pleasant, but more exact colours. I beg to differ. Certain colours - especially skin tones and sky blue - are pleasant when and because they are natural, i.e. correct. A green cast on skin tone is just as unnatural as a cyan - turquoise cast in the sky.

I can buy the theory of the less correct/more pleasant colours when we talk yellow flowers and red cars. But on skyblue and skin tones we immediately spot the least problem. Natural = correct.

Diapositivo said:

...If you look above your head during central hours of the day and the sky is clear of any clouds you always see the same shade of blue...

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There must be no air pollution in Rome these days.

Air pollution is a problem and certainly alters the sky near the horizon. I see this in my Roman summer pictures and also in the Paris summer pictures I am working on. Quite frightening. But it is invisible if you look upward.

While being on a small hill and looking the horizon the dirt on the lower part of the sky is clearly visible:

Warning for the delicate: digital picture.

http://www.alamy.com/thumbs/6/{83471D9F-59F2-4A5A-B2DE-2A308773C3FA}/BMA6FT.jpg

Diapositivo said:

The problem resides in scanning and posting without doing the basics, which is:

Buying a target and profiling your scanner
http://www.targets.coloraid.de/

Buying a device to profile your monitor and profiling it every two weeks or so. An example:
http://www.datacolor.eu/en/products/display-calibration/spyder4express/index.html

Don't strip profiles from your JPEGs (don't use Photoshop "save for web", that is).

Those three simple actions will guarantee that what I see on my profiled monitor is very, very close to what you see on your profiled monitor.
Any other procedure results in a random colour cast.

It's as if anybody compared the results of their negatives while each one uses a different bath temperature during developing, and observed pictures under different light, and printed while "forgetting" some random filter on the enlarger head. It just makes no much sense.

(Sky in #56 on my monitor is unnaturally cyan. The sky is skyblue not skycyan ).

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Thank you for this, Diapositivo. I just bought an Epson v600, and was looking for calibration targets.

Sure, without calibrations it will be difficult to know how the prints[and scanned to be uploaded here] or colors should look, i have a calibration device for monitor and scanner, i have one simple target came with my Epson scanner but i don't know how to use it and i am looking for another better target.