It does seem that most people shooting the film on Flickr are blind to colour casts. What might be off-putting about what you're seeing is the lack of creative control, less some ugliness inherent in the film. We're all going to get different results after all, either optically or digitally, and that's the joy of looking at other people's pictures? Hopefully people aren't condoning a 'right and proper' standard for interpreting this film, but that we arrive at some kind of balanced and neutral result - but our own treatment is what makes the pictures our own. People will always be hyper-sensitive to slight colour shifts and the art of shooting colour is controlling them to evoke mood and atmosphere - in other words, it's as clear as day when it's unintentional.
If you see a cyan cast and it bothers you, like other people have suggested, it can be easily remedied either on the computer or in the darkroom. I still think Ektar does something different with blue dominated light, but isn't inhibited by it in the way suggested.
EDIT: Also, as I have done with new colour films in the past, it might be an idea to send a roll off to a decent lab for a balanced scan. Then you might have a slightly better idea of the palette and what you're working with. Home scanned images you'll see on Flickr will inevitably be all over the place.
The real issue with colour and computer screens, screens are affected by the light colour in the room, if you balance the colour in a room with incandescent lighting, and then I look at it, during the day with daylight on my screen, your image will look very blue. Also, no two screens seem to have the same colour temperature.
The real issue with colour and computer screens, screens are affected by the light colour in the room, if you balance the colour in a room with incandescent lighting, and then I look at it, during the day with daylight on my screen, your image will look very blue. Also, no two screens seem to have the same colour temperature.
I've lived and worked in the Los Angeles area since 1978, experiencing "world class" air pollution, especially during those earlier years. Even when low inversion layers means bad smog is only 3000 - 4000 feet thick, it adds a yellow/brown tinge to the sky's blue that's visible at all observation angles, including straight up.Air pollution is a problem and certainly alters the sky near the horizon...But it is invisible if you look upward...
So if the monitor is calibrated and the scanner is profiled and no filters be used to shoot, what will cause any color cast in your color negs?
The same thing that will cause a colour cast in your slide film, i.e. a mismatch between light temperature and film light-temperature calibration, or coloured objects projecting their tint on other objects. This case is more frequent than ordinarily thought:
the blue sky is the obvious case: it will project its bluish tint over some neutral surface (rock, concrete) so that it will appear bluish to the careful photographer's eye, or it will appear bluish when printed especially if, in the same picture, there are details which are in full sun (which will have no cast as the "white" direct sunlight will prevail over the "bluish" sky light, and will make the bluish cast of the object in the shade even more noticeable).
Another frequent case is a picture under a tree especially at noon: the light from above will pass through the leaves and you will have a "green shower" on the objects in the tree shade. Next time you take a portrait under a tree and complain about the bad skin tone, remember that. Walls of red bricks do not constitute a flattering side reflector either. Even meadows can create problems as they will project (with the right light conditions) their green reflection on the white trousers of the model.
Again, let's say you are at a vintage car exhibition. An old red Ferrari stands near and old white Mercedes. You take pictures of the Mercedes and when you are home you can't get rid of a reddish cast on the white surface. That's the red kiss of the Ferrari nearby.
With a bit of attention all those phenomena are actually quite visible with the naked eye. Just go to a crowded parking lot, it's easy to observe all the colour casts projected by coloured cars on the side of the neutral cars nearby. Try and you'll be surprised.
This makes colour photography tricky. While we are there we consider the Mercedes white. While we are at home we want to print it white in any case because the reddish cast would not make any sense: the Ferrari is not even in the frame. Correcting for the red on the white Mercedes might play havoc with the colours in the rest of the picture. By the same token, trying to render as "white" the white trousers of your friend posing near the green bush might mean subtracting a lot of green and having awful colours. "White balancing" can lead to chromatic disasters.
Another kind of colour cast is specific to negative film in absence of a correct film profiling (which is different from monitor profiling and scanner profiling).
With colour slides if you profile your scanner you have a scan which is "like your slide". If you use Velvia, you obtain a scan with "Velvia green". This Velvia green might or might not be the exact reproduction of the green of the grass, but having profiled your scanner you at least know that what you get is what you see on the light table (WYGIWYSONLT), including all the colour casts there are visible on the slides, but with none added by the scanner. The good news is that, Velvia aside, normally a slide will give you a very close match of the real colour - meaning acceptably close for normal purposes: excluding catalogues, art reproductions etc. - if we exclude situations which will introduce a colour cast as those outlined above.
Negatives are a bit of a complication more. With negative films when you proceed with inversion/filtration you might find that there are many filtrations which could be decent, and none which is really satisfactory, or this is my experience. It is my understanding that the only way to really overcome this problem is to create a "film profile".
A film profile tries to describe the colour behaviour of a film so as to render the green of the grass as "the green of the grass" and not as the green on the film. You can create film profiles both for slide films and for negative films. It is generally felt more for negative film given the filtration ambiguity negative film poses.
Once you created a film profile, applying it on your scan and having it honoured by your monitor, you should obtain the "correct" colour response, where "correct" means the kind of precision you want for catalogues or scientific reproductions.
Mind you: a film profile has the precise intent to "get rid" of the character of the film, i.e. to have a "grass green" instead of the "Velvia green" or the "flower yellow" instead of the "Ektar yellow". If you use a monitor profile, a scanner profile, and a film profile, and your client uses a profiled monitor, and his viewing program honours the colour management, and you don't strip the colour-management information, then the picture he will see on his monitor will be quite close to the real colour of the jumper in your catalogue.
A film profile is nothing really strange. I expect to be normal that colour printing with an enlarger requires some preliminary tests to find the correct filtration for a certain film/paper couple. When you find it, all pictures taken with the same light conditions - and absent the colour cast situations explained above - should give you the same kind of results. Your normal values for your film/paper couple is the "profile" of your enlarger for that film/paper couple.
Sometimes there is little you can do if the film is exposed at the wrong color temp without necessary
filtration, esp w/Ektar. You can't just balance it properly afterwards if you've placed exp of one dye
relative to another at a place geometrically different than another curve. These dye sensitivity curves aren't exactly straight-line!! Of course, there's always some smart ass who claims he can do
anything in Fauxtoshop, but that will be the same kind of dude who is complaining that Kodak is just
a bunch of idiots who don't know how to make film.
Of course, there's always some smart ass who claims he can do anything in Fauxtoshop, but that will be the same kind of dude who is complaining that Kodak is just a bunch of idiots who don't know how to make film.
I've lived and worked in the Los Angeles area since 1978, experiencing "world class" air pollution, especially during those earlier years. Even when low inversion layers means bad smog is only 3000 - 4000 feet thick, it adds a yellow/brown tinge to the sky's blue that's visible at all observation angles, including straight up.
OK, end of off-topic diversion.
Most of the time. But not all of the time....The Yellow Yuck is gone.
hrst, you are opening a can of worms here.
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).
The general rule when observing photographies on a monitor is to have a slight ambient light. No ambient light at all makes for a very nice impression but if you do it as a job (therefore you do it hours per day) it gets tiring for the eyes. That's true for forum reading as well: avoid too much contrast. To much ambient light does not help observing the image either. Semi-darkness is the ideal situation.
At the moment in my room I have the shutters shut for around 80%.
When evening comes I have a small abat-jour with a relatively small daylight-balanced lamp. The light is placed on my side, quite away from my angle of vision, and doesn't make a reflection on the monitor. I covered some big book with a red jacket on the bookshelf. Ideally the rest of the room is all neutral. Your desktop wallpaper is neutral, your background while looking at pictures is neutral (a shade of grey, or black, avoid white) and if it were possible the bars of your APUG interface would be grey instead of brown (for instance background-color: #595656 should better be #565656).
Calibrated monitors - supposing the monitor is of decent quality - take away the biggest problem in colour inconsistencies between photographers. Calibrating a scanner is certainly something that is extremely useful also for an analogue zealot like the average APUG memberbecause ultimately if we talk photographs and if we want to enjoy our exchange of opinions we should at least collaborate so that we all see the same image we are talking about
I would like to stress that all of above is not really expensive. The calibration device for the monitor is around 100 new but I suppose it can be bought second hand, or New Old Stock.
Monitor calibration is inescapable because all colour correction one does during a scan to be presented to APUG fellow members is done "through" the monitor. If the monitor has a colour cast ALL one's scans will have an opposite colour cast. So much work in the field, in the darkroom, and in the "lightroom" gets basically wasted at least as far as presenting the work to the APUG community is concerned.
In any conversation a language, a jargon, hopefully a grammar should be agreed in advance for the conversation to have a meaning. Confronting colours without a common "colour language" makes IMO the conversation meaningless, on APUG no less than on a digital capture photography site.
it never ever falls toward cyan - turquoise. Yes, it really does. It is not VERY usual, and it is NOT very saturated, but it's all about combining effects.
(1) We have a slight cyan-turquoise tint in the sky in reality
(2) We photograph it with a film which INCREASES SATURATION (Ektar), so this tint is exaggerated
(3) The film (Ektar) happens to have a trait of SLIGHTLY amplifying certain shades of cyan-turquoise, so this tint is again exaggerated
(4) Our film (Ektar) does NOT have the typical magenta tint we are accustomed with when using high-saturation chrome films that are often compared to Ektar
(5) The user scans the film with a horrible scanner and workflow that does not work, and anything can happen.
While I completely agree that (5) is the most important reason for "problems" reported, we still cannot just explain everything by going all techno.
Color photography is all about understanding color, and I hate it when it is called a "problem", or when color photography is called "difficult" just because the difficulty is in adjusting colors to match a set of UNREALISTIC random rules created by PEER PRESSURE, not by one's own passion for color. Another typical example of this peer pressure is the insane bitching about skewed horizon line, which can happen even if the picture does not even show horizon line but a true slope.
Usually this leads to a situation where people try to "correct" colors that WERE not only correct but also looked good to begin with, without trusting their own sense of color but being afraid that "this might not be neutral" or "someone might complain this is not neutral". To make things worse, this "correction" work is usually done with tools that do not even allow real color correction (such as Photoshop Levels and Curves).
You mentioned the skin color as an another example of a "reference", and you are as wrong as you are with the sky. There is no one, two, three or ten different skin colors. The range of skin tones is ENDLESS and has many dimensions. And now combine endless range of different skintones with endless range of skylight hues with endless range of filtered sunlight hues, and everything you mentioned in your later post...!
No wonder portraits are often made in studio. However, it will be very educational experience to try shooting "neutral" portraits outdoors, because the only way to achieve this will be MODIFYING the light and this includes using at least reflectors, but also filters, fill lights, filters over them, etc. It does not work by complaining about film or camera and then adjusting random knobs in Photoshop.
Here is an example of Kodak Ektar I have. Same frame of film scanned with two different scanners and their native software - no pre or post adjustment, default/auto setting.
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