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

[wogster]

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.

 

[batwister]

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 tend to think prints are more difficult to judge based on the lighting conditions - certainly if you're holding the print, the paper also absorbs light from underneath. A consideration if you have cyan coloured flooring!

 

[Diapositivo]

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 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 member because 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.

 

[TareqPhoto]

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?

 

[Sal Santamaura]

Air pollution is a problem and certainly alters the sky near the horizon...But it is invisible if you look upward...

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.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Sal - we grew up in the Sierras, and it was a routine experience to stand atop some high peak and
note how the color of the air changed looking down - the pollen haze beginning at about 8000ft,
then the campfire smoke etc around 6000, then distinct brown smog maybe 1500, then below that
Central Valley "black" (or planet Venus yellow-green if you were looking down toward Bakersfield!).
When my older brother moved away to study photog at Brooks Insititute in the 60's he liked to enter
all kinds of photo contests, which at that time opened up doors to commissioned work. He put a color print in the Nature division of an LA contest and the judges threw it out for "faking" the blue
in the sky (decades before Photoshop). Apparently none of them had seen an actual blue sky!

 

[Diapositivo]

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.

 

[TareqPhoto]

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.

Well spoken words.

Ok, we will keep those in mind and see what we can offer to make more precise results, in all cases i don't have problem with color negs or even slides, sometimes i miss the exposure properly so then it is my mistake, but other time the results are very identical to what i see or look for, i still have digital camera, not only 35mm but MF too, so this one give me the best color i ever seen in my life, i can try to see each color film what it can give as neutral or as contrasty saturated character of a digital accurate one if you believe there is something accurate to your science.

 

[DREW WILEY]

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.

 

[TareqPhoto]

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.

Unfortunately - even i don't understand your post - it is true!!!

 

[Prof_Pixel]

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.

Wow...all I can say is "LOL"

 

[Sirius Glass]

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.

In the late '60s and early '70s from West Los Angeles and Santa Monica, downtown and Pasadena were in the "Yellow Yuck" [a technical term] all the time. It has been many years since that was cleaned up. The Yellow Yuck is gone.

 

[Sal Santamaura]

...The Yellow Yuck is gone.

Most of the time. But not all of the time.

 

[hrst]

hrst, you are opening a can of worms here.

Great, that was my intention!

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).

You just go so wrong here! Firstoff, you have so much conditions here that it is very seldom that they all hold at the same time in the case of photography. For example, how often do we take photographs straight upwards to the sky?

No, our photographs most often show the horizon and up to 60-70 degrees or so. And we photograph on a cloudy or part-cloudy weather; especially I need to mention layers of very thin clouds or more like haze on the sky; it may still LOOK like a sunny day without clouds, but these tiny droplets scatter light.

The system is complex but it consists of simple parts. First, all the blue color IS due to scattering! If the oxygen just worked like an absorbing filter, we would see black sky because there is no backlight (except for the Sun, which is a small spot). Now, you must understand that this scattering does not only provide "blue" in the meaning of something like 440-480 nm. Pure sky blue also has a substantial amount of wavelengths at cyan and green, even at midday, even when you look directly up.

Now, let's make a simplification and say that the color of sunlight is "minus-sky", due to the very same phenomenon that gives the color its color by Rayleigh scattering. You can think the Sun as a white light source in the enlarger, and the sky as a dichroic filter passing "yellowish" (minus-sky) light and reflecting the sky-colored light. Now make this filter very very faint and put millions of them everywhere -- as we look at the complex, we see the surfaces of those dichroic filters, reflecting sky-colored light, but the system also has this minus-sky light everywhere -- after all, it is the very source of the further skyblue scatterings taking place everywhere.

(The very reason why we have different color temperatures in sunlight at different times of day, is that when the sky is near the horizon, the light passes through more of these "filters".)

Now what do you think happens with this minus-sky light? Right, it gets scattered, too, and mixes with the sky-colored light. It scatters in tiny droplets we ALWAYS have in the air. It is just that we have more of those when the air is moist. We have different amount of droplets at different locations in the huge 3D world of the sky. Natural and man-made particles just add the complexity. These particles may also be colored, which adds even more new parameters. Now actually, the water droplets are below freezing point and thus, ice. Surprisingly, ice forms crystals that add even more complexity. Living in a country with last two winters having some very cold days, we could actually see VERY impressing phenomena near street lights at night. This included three huge beams kilometers long going directly upwards and sideways at 90 degree angles, due to tiny ice crystals interacting in the air. This is just to show the complexity and all of this happens all the time in the sky.

But, if it was just sky-color and minus-sky-color light mixing, we would just have neutral density, right? That's the problem with our earlier simplification. Again, it is more complex than this. Oxygen atoms do not ONLY cause Rayleigh scattering, but they also ABSORB longer wavelengths. Due to this mechanism, even in the simplified case, sky-colored light and minus-sky-colored light do not sum up to neutral density or white light. Now, we add the droplets, different thickness of air at different angles of vision, different thickness of air due to different local air pressures, natural white particles, natural colored particles (pollen to start with...), man-made particles...... And as a result, we have a sky color that can be practically ANYTHING within certain limits, of course.

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.

And, Ektar is not originally meant for neutral portrait work!

But, IMO, we should enjoy the colors and try all kind of things to manipulate them. The nature is so colorful and has so much to offer, so we don't need to modify our photos to look always the same when the nature does not look always the same.

 

[Alan Klein]

Although I haven't scanned Ektar 100, I have scanned 15 year old 120 format negatives I shot with Ektar 25. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/ektar/
Also old Fujicolor http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/fujicolor/
and some old Optima http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/optima/
and new Portra http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/portra/

I've scanned on an Epson V600 with the Epson scanner program set for color adjustments with only a little post processing afterwards. I can also scan flat and adjust in post scan to the same colors using Elements 8 using Auto-levels with minor tweaking afterwards. The scanner program doesn't know which film other than it's negative. It handles positives pretty well too.
Velvia 50 http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/velvia/
Velvia 100 http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/velvia100/
Ektachrome http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/ektachrome/
Kodachrome http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/tags/kodachrome/

I don't understand why there's so much angst over this process. There is a learning process that does take time. But the Epson or Elements programs seem to do fine. Maybe the non-Epson scanner programs make it too complicated?

 

[Les Sarile]

The angst is due to others trying color C41 film A and not getting what they want from it while others get fine results.

So is this due to:

1. Bad film
2. Bad film developing
3. Bad optical printing
4. Bad scanning/post processing
5. Bad monitor
6. Bad lens
7. Bad camera
8. Bad atmospheric conditions
9. All or some of the above

Of course it doesn't help when Kodak post that this is ideal for scanning in their announcement and I suppose others may take this to mean anyone with a scanner will be able to automatically get great results from it. Of course Kodak representatives also state there are no standards in scanning.

From what I have been able to test myself, it is likely mostly #4.

 

[wogster]

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 member because 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.

The issue with calibration in digital is that the monitor, scanner and printer must match, and they need to be re-calibrated on a regular basis, like every six months to a year, to make sure that the device as it ages hasn't shifted colours any. Of course the calibration and normal use must take place in the same lighting.

One other thing people forget when scanning is something that darkroom photographers have known since the first colour print films, each film requires slightly different filtration, even with the same process and the same paper, so it makes sense that this applies equally to scanning. Most scanning software will allow you to adjust the colour, as you scan, so if your scanning 30 images from the same roll, you set the colour on the first, and then scan them all, as long as the lighting is similar you don't need to readjust again, until you scan a different film.

 

[Les Sarile]

Here is one such example of a bad first impression with Kodak Ektar 100 due to scanning. He then worked it out later on.
Before -> I like Ice Cream Better than Ektar 100 in My Classic
After -> Ektar 100 Revisted with Vuescan

 

[Alan Klein]

Much much better Les. And it's sharper, more in focus. What did you change?

 

[Les Sarile]

That was someone else's bad experience not mine. It looks like he worked out a better Vuescan process.

 

[Les Sarile]

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.

 

[Alan Klein]

Les: I was just thinking about your points 1 and 2 about bad film and bad processing. I don't process my film but get it done professionally here in NYC by pro developers who serve the commercial industry. I wonder if that's why I'm not having as many problems as others with the scan process. If other are starting with colors that are off slightly, no wonder they can't get it "right." On the other hand, I taken others "bad" color scans and run it through Elements 8 Auto Levels. The colors and exposures got a lot better. It's all very confusing.

 

[Diapositivo]

Hrst, at the end of the day, although I would never disagree with your physical explanation of the complex and variable phenomena which make the sky the beautiful colour it is, at the end of the day in my experience I never, ever saw a sky with the amount of cyan - turquoise I see when seeing the mountain image a few posts above on my monitor. OK, there is some cyan in the sky (or it would look "a light shade of photographic blue"). OK there must some green and I trust you. But I never have the visual impression of a sky falling toward turquoise (so that I can say: we have a more-than-usual-turquoise tinted sky today) or toward green. The mountain shot above has a sky which is IMO unnatural. When a sky has a magenta tint, or a reddish tint, yellow, orange etc. that's still within our experience and so it is not unnatural. Turquoise tint, never seen.

You say more ore less the same when you say:

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.

You are basically saying: the cyan is in fact there and the workflow or the film is merely exaggerating it. OK. But if this exaggeration makes the sky "weird" then the picture does not work IMO.

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).

I agree with above, in the sense that ultimately it's the visual result that must be natural to be appealing. Sometimes one just should accept that the shade is bluish in the picture as it is in reality, and as the attentive eye can actually see it, and the picture works very well with that bluish shade, because it is, in fact, natural.
My rule of thumb would be that if part of the image is in full sun and part in shade, the part in shade should have a bluish tint as the eye would actually perceive it while looking carefully, rather than trying to correct the shade to neutral and make a mess with the tint of the part in sunlight.

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.

Regarding skin tones, although skin tones come in a great variety of colours, what I say is that we instantly recognise when the colour is "weird" or unnatural. This as you say may be dependent on factors which are different from film and print/scan technique (as in my example of the portrait under a tree at noon with all the green light shower over the subject) but what ultimately counts is that the skin tone appears natural. That might imply moving the subject to another shade - hopefully not the red brick wall though.

Where I agree with you is that visual appearance is much more important than measures.

 

[Diapositivo]

The examples shown by Les Sarile in posts #93 and #96 show very well how a bad scanning technique is often confused by film character in internet comparisons. #96 shows the typical turquoise sky which is just unnatural IMO.

This post also shows very well what I mean when I say that the sky can be a "reference". The reddish leaves of the plant in post #96 could be natural in both shots, both are equally "credible". But the sky in the lower half is not "credible". The sky doesn't come in many variations of colours, compared to the rest of nature around us.

This also shows, again, the advantage of using slide film over negative when the printer is not the photographer (and why slide film was the preferred medium in the stock photography industry) and when there is no known reference.

Absent the sky in the picture, both filtrations would have been "credible" and many other filtrations would have been credible as well. But which is the "truer" one? "True" can be very important but the printer might be left in the dark regarding which filtration to use.

A slide, on the other hand, is always "in the ballpark". A slide would never come out with a turquoise sky as in the lower part of the picture in #96. Even if the sky weren't present in the picture, and the subject were only the plant, a slide would give a "fairly true" colour of the leaves that the printer can trust to be close to the actual colour in reality.

 

[wogster]

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.

In other words scanning is like printing, you can expect a different result with different equipment and materials. That should be a given.... I would expect that if I make a print using a General enlarger on Fuji CA paper and use the same filter settings on a Beseler enlarger on Kodak paper (same neg) it would look different to. I don't think it's the scanning software, it's the settings for the software..... I don't think I ever scanned a negative where I didn't load it into The GIMP or Photoshop to make adjustments after.