Kodak Ektar 100 - ugly colors. Advice needed

[swilf]

Colour balance fixes any perceived problems with sky and shadows too, it only takes 30sec - 1min. Though we should stop talking about this here.

I'm afraid it does not. Any "simple" color correction, using color correction filters or digital controls will not make Ektar look realistic in some cases. Anyway, the OP's problem is a different one.

 

[pinhole_dreamer]

I like the reds.

 

[polyglot]

I disagree about the VueScan thing, obviously

 

[Dr.Pain-MD]

I've had great results scanning Ektar negatives. You just have to manually adjust your levels and curves if you want good results, you can't rely on the automatic scanning features as they're almost never right.

 

[pukalo]

This highlights the 2 major flaws with Ektar - it goes blue/cyan very easily, and more importantly, it is very diffifult to scan with even close to correct colors on consumer scanners. My first experience with Ektar, shortly afetr it came out, were some Fall portraits of my kids on a pumpkin wagon. Shot under overcast skies, the resulting scans had horrendously blue tinted results. it was shocking, made Provia seem like it was E100GX ! Anyways, impossible to get good results on my high end Minolta 5400 I scanner. However, the $25,000 Noritsu at the lab was able to scan with decent colors - most likely they had professional correction curves for this very finicky film. On the positive side, I will say it does fantastic sunsets - almost as good as slide film does.

 

[Photo Engineer]

If you look at the technical data sheets you will see a huge similarity between Ektar and Portra. I suspect that they use the same dye sets, but different emulsions. If so, then it would be difficult to explain what you observe.

PE

 

[hpulley]

I find my CanoScan 9000F can certainly look blue with this film underexposed. I find it difficult to correct.


Ektar blue underexposure by Harry Pulley, on Flickr

Exposed properly it looks great however.


Ektar normal exposure by Harry Pulley, on Flickr

Yes, of course I'll RA-4 print them to see how I can do there. Just quick scans for sharing, that's all these are. Won't be any digital output from these...

 

[polyglot]

I don't think it's just scanners, I think there really is something going on in the blue channel. While I've no doubt that there's a lot of (chemical) similarity to Portra, there's clearly not in terms of colour sensitisation and saturation.

I've looked at a couple of shots with what should be an approximately black background and there's a big sheet of yellow in the negative that's visible against the mask, i.e. you can see the frame edges. When picking the black point, I find it works best if you include this extra little bit of yellow (i.e. subtract some blue) and it all comes out pretty well. If you take completely-blank film as the mask colour then you can get the weirdness in blue.

Perhaps there's a stop or so better sensitivity in the blue, so the R & G will drop off the toe first? I'm totally speculating there, but there is a visible difference between the shadows of Ektar and Portra negs.

 

[perkeleellinen]

My experience with this film is that when it was first released the pictures I saw online (and still see now) had very odd colours and quite cyan skies. When I optically printed my first roll it looked nothing like what I saw online and initially I thought my process was wrong and perhaps the chemistry was shot but I think I've found this film to be much more 'normal' than online examples indicate.

 

[Photo Engineer]

The underexposed example in post 32 can be corrected nicely in PS, but is nevertheless underexposed. It is always best to overexpose any color negative film (or B&W film for that matter) by about 1/3 stop. I use ISO 100 for Portra 160 and ISO 320 for any 400 film. This goes along with the charts that I posted a few months back regarding the first acceptable good print and which was taken from Haist.

PE

 

[Tim Gray]

It's very easy actually to get good colours. Do not use VueScan, it's a joke. Dumb film profiles and a load of pointlessly convoluted controls. All you need to do is hit the colour balance option in Epson Scan or whatever basic scanning package.


Colour balance fixes any perceived problems with sky and shadows too, it only takes 30sec - 1min. Though we should stop talking about this here.

So we are all going to register at a different forum to continue this discussion?

Anyway, I use Vuescan. I agree with you, the profiles are ridiculous. On the other hand, its semi-straightforward to get a raw scan out of it, and from there inverting and color correcting in Photoshop isn't all that hard and gives much superior results. Better than NikonScan in my case. Of course, this assumes that a) you are will to do some work to get your final image and b) you have Photoshop or some other capable program with curves (lightroom doesn't cut it).

It's not automatic, but an action in Photoshop can easily be written that does most of it for you, and all you need to do is step in at a couple spots and make some adjustments.

 

[bblhed]

I have a little experience with the film, and it was very hard to get decent colors with conventional scanning software. There's nothing wrong with your scanner, of course. I advise you to get raw scans from VueScan and then invert them in PS using Curves or ColorNeg.

There are problems with the film after all. Or maybe just features. Color of pale sky usually shifts to cyan. There is blue cast in shadows (I must admit that sometimes it does look great). The blue cast is severe in case of underexposure, so you may try to underrate it a bit.

I shoot film because I don't want to buy more and more software. I don't own photoshop because I shoot film and don't need photoshop to project my slides. I shoot slides to avoid all of these problems. If I want to shoot Ektar as I do sometimes I have it processed and printed by a shop that can do it properly. If it is not coming out of the scanner right that is because it wants to be printed, not scanned.

 

[babaluma]

Just using the "I'm feeling lucky" button in Picasa gave me this.

I have a feeling this is what you are looking for.

On my opinion it looks a bit too red still... (maybe more autumn like). In my case it was a spring day, actually.

 

[babaluma]

Hallo everybody,
I finally played with vuescan again and got this result with adjusted blue and red part:

I still don't thing colours are correct...

 

[babaluma]

I find my CanoScan 9000F can certainly look blue with this film underexposed. I find it difficult to correct.


Ektar blue underexposure by Harry Pulley, on Flickr

Exposed properly it looks great however.


Ektar normal exposure by Harry Pulley, on Flickr

Yes, of course I'll RA-4 print them to see how I can do there. Just quick scans for sharing, that's all these are. Won't be any digital output from these...

Hi hpulley,
thanks for a great example.
What kind of film have you been using?

 

[babaluma]

It's very easy actually to get good colours. Do not use VueScan, it's a joke. Dumb film profiles and a load of pointlessly convoluted controls. All you need to do is hit the colour balance option in Epson Scan or whatever basic scanning package.


Colour balance fixes any perceived problems with sky and shadows too, it only takes 30sec - 1min. Though we should stop talking about this here.

I have tried to scan with Epson SW - result was about the same.
So, it looks like as it's not because of scanning software failures

 

[babaluma]

I have a little experience with the film, and it was very hard to get decent colors with conventional scanning software. There's nothing wrong with your scanner, of course. I advise you to get raw scans from VueScan and then invert them in PS using Curves or ColorNeg.

There are problems with the film after all. Or maybe just features. Color of pale sky usually shifts to cyan. There is blue cast in shadows (I must admit that sometimes it does look great). The blue cast is severe in case of underexposure, so you may try to underrate it a bit.

Good point,
i have also been thinking about working with raw output rather then with Jpegs

 

[babaluma]

You didn't post anything?

Sry for another delay, - now i did.

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

*** Dupe post: deleted ***

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

The overall pallete is quite ghastly, particularly the articulation of red and the almost Kodachrome-like quality of pale sky.

Firstly, its important to reinforce something: scanners are not "OK". All scans of film will require work. My Epson V700 has been found by my lab to have a moderate blue displacement. I use Photoshop Elements 8 for post-scan and print RIP work to TIF files.

How are you setting the scans for viewing — on the web or via hard printing?

You say in your post that it was evening and a bit red, and you point the finger at the film that, probably by dint of its design, "lifts" the R/ channel higher (like Velvia does to the G/ and B/ channels), but it still has a very peculiar blue shift. So in effect, this lift is perhaps not satisactory to you?

Colour is always set for the destination device (e.g. web or printer) when working on scans (via Photoshop or some other software). Additionally, the rendering intent must be correct (absolute, relative or perceptual), as must the profile, all again to match the destination device and desired use. If not, the colours you see at your end will not be the same as the printer or screen (not all screens display colour correctly) — it's not rocket science to line everything up, but it does require a bit of training.

The negatives are not beyound redemption. Straighten, correct colour, crop and reassess.

 

[babaluma]

The overall pallete is quite ghastly, particularly the articulation of red and the almost Kodachrome-like quality of pale sky.

Firstly, its important to reinforce something: scanners are not "OK". All scans of film will require work. My Epson V700 has been found by my lab to have a moderate blue displacement. I use Photoshop Elements 8 for post-scan and print RIP work to TIF files.

How are you setting the scans for viewing — on the web or via hard printing?

You say in your post that it was evening and a bit red, and you point the finger at the film that, probably by dint of its design, "lifts" the R/ channel higher (like Velvia does to the G/ and B/ channels), but it still has a very peculiar blue shift. So in effect, this lift is perhaps not satisactory to you?

Colour is always set for the destination device (e.g. web or printer) when working on scans (via Photoshop or some other software). Additionally, the rendering intent must be correct (absolute, relative or perceptual), as must the profile, all again to match the destination device and desired use. If not, the colours you see at your end will not be the same as the printer or screen (not all screens display colour correctly) — it's not rocket science to line everything up, but it does require a bit of training.

The negatives are not beyound redemption. Straighten, correct colour, crop and reassess.

Hi Poisson Du Jour,

Those scans were for web, but i think it should be fair to try to print this out and check a difference. Even with all monitor failures this film is obviously very velvic for such scenes i.e. it will be very hard to get resluts with soft evening natural colors like this (Ektacolor pro 160):

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

If your scans are solely for viewing on the web, you accept that colours may shift or be displayed differently from one monitor to the next. That's not your fault, of course.
Maybe you should align your scans for prints to give you an idea of the many factors that come into play that govern how well a scan displays vs prints. Film scanning is not an art, but it does require a lot of patience and observation. What I see here is a reasonably attractive representation of the image in terms of colour and tonal gradation, and a subtle renderingn of yellow and red. Is there anything else you were attempting to achieve by way of colour nuances?

 

[hpulley]

Hi hpulley,
thanks for a great example.
What kind of film have you been using?

Those examples are both Kodak Ektar (100) 120 in my Mamiya RB67 ProS.

I've also been shooting a lot of Fuji Reala and Kodak Portra 160NC lately when I shoot color, which seems to be the majority of what I shoot with spring flowers and short sleeves coming out (I've been shooting Ilford Delta 100 and 3200 and FP4+ mostly of late when doing B&W).

 

[T0MA]

I did some fast testing and here are my results. I measured sunny area at front and took three shots. I scanned to 16bit tiff and used negfix8 script for positive conversion. From those I would say that overexposing looks best and has least "blue" cast. All images are directly after negfix8 without other modifications.

Now I have to say that actually all looked really good after I just played bit with blue color curve and I got pretty much those color that I was expecting. Also those were really close to prints I got from local lab. So I would say that bit blue color cast will show easier in dark areas if just some basic color manipulation is done (like invert and autolevels). I suppose good scanner software with profiles for current film would handle this without problems also but currently I don't have those.

So I would conclude that overexposing bit would maybe make scanning easier. Also getting rid of that color cast was not too difficult at least in this case so even underexposing did not cause any more trouble.

 

[Photo Engineer]

A matter of software

This is how my software handles that example.

No doubt a wet print with suitable exposure changes would render them all virtually identical. I have done it with Portra VC 160. Examples are posted here on APUG.

PE