Kodak Gold on Fuji Paper

ericdan · Feb 13, 2015

Hi,
I am planning on printing Kodak Gold 200 negatives on Fuji paper. Fuji color paper is the only paper I could find in Japan.
Kodak's data sheets say that the films are designed for Kodak endure papers etc.
Can I still print on fuji paper? Any major initial adjustments that I need to dial in for that?

Thanks

Neal · Feb 13, 2015

Dear ericdan,

Yes. Your filter pack will be different but you should have no problems.

Neal Wydra

railwayman3 · Feb 13, 2015

Should be no problem, perhaps, as Neal suggests, you may need a few test strips to pin down basic filtration. Remember that pro labs deal (or dealt!) with a variety of makes and types of color neg, but usually keep to one brand of paper. It's possible to get quality prints from any make of neg, just down to patience and standards of work.

ericdan · Feb 14, 2015

So I ended up printing Natura1600, Ektar100, Gold200 and Super Gold 400 on Fuji Pro paper on a Lucky dichroic-filtered color head and a Fujimoto color processor for the paper.

For what it's worth, Super Gold 400 is Ultramax 400. They both say GC-400.
Natura and Super Gold worked like a charm on this paper.
I dialed in C 0, M 50, Y 50 for the Natura and it didn't need any adjustment at all.
For all my Super Gold frames I noticed they were a bit magenta so I dialed in C 0, M65, Y50 and it looked very very close to my frontier scans. For these films the printing process was super fast.

Ektar100 had magenta shadows when I started at C0, M50, Y50. Dialing in C0, M57.5, Y50 fixed that but the highlights looked a bit odd. I think with more time and tweaking I can make Ektar work too.

The most difficult film was Kodak Gold 200. At my base setting of C0, M50, Y50 it had strong yellow and magenta highlights.
I just couldn't get it right. It was either too magenta or too green. Or too yellow or too blue.
I expected this film to behave much like the Super Gold 400, but it didn't at all.

I'll report back when I figure out how to print that film. It's one of my favorites when scanned on a frontier.

Photo Engineer · Feb 14, 2015

Fuji and Kodak films do not exactly match to the paper that they make. There are some differences that involve the dye sets used in the films.

PE

ericdan · Feb 14, 2015

In any case I am amazed at what I got out of consumer grade film.
Super Gold 400 is cheaper than even Superia in Japan and the results are great.

Photo Engineer · Feb 15, 2015

Yeah, I love it. I used to work on it! Way back when!

PE

railwayman3 · Feb 15, 2015

Photo Engineer said:
Fuji and Kodak films do not exactly match to the paper that they make. There are some differences that involve the dye sets used in the films.

PE

So, everything else being equal, and for absolute top quality, does that mean that Kodak negs would be better printed on Kodak paper, and Fuji on Fuji ? (I'm interested because my late Father used a lot of Agfa color neg film which he sent to a lab using Agfa paper. He said this gave the finest results, but I'd always thought that it was just down to it being a good quality lab rather than anything else special. )

railwayman3 · Feb 15, 2015

ericdan said:
In any case I am amazed at what I got out of consumer grade film.
Super Gold 400 is cheaper than even Superia in Japan and the results are great.

I've always thought that any modern film can give very acceptable results with careful processing and printing...there's still too much poor quality work, even from some of the few so-called "professional" labs which are left. IMHO.

Photo Engineer · Feb 15, 2015

railwayman3 said:
So, everything else being equal, and for absolute top quality, does that mean that Kodak negs would be better printed on Kodak paper, and Fuji on Fuji ? (I'm interested because my late Father used a lot of Agfa color neg film which he sent to a lab using Agfa paper. He said this gave the finest results, but I'd always thought that it was just down to it being a good quality lab rather than anything else special. )

The answer is: "that depends".

At Kodak, the paper is designed with broad sensitivity and so the film dyes become less important. It also allowed use at KRL to make changes to the film with less or no consequence to the final print. However, Fuji and Agfa used different paper sensitizers which at one time made it more difficult to print Kodak film with their papers.

It was generally true that Agfa, Fuji and Kodak onto Kodak paper worked well but Kodak and Agfa onto Fuji paper was less acceptable or shall we say harder to get that really good print hidden in the negative. I have heard that this problem is either much less or does not exist in the most recent films and papers, but I cannot confirm it.

PE

RPC · Feb 15, 2015

I can confirm it. The Fuji paper I use, Crystal Archive Type II, has had no problem with the Kodak, Konica and Agfa negatives that I have printed on it. Two prints side by side, one CAII and one Endura look nearly identical. If there is any difference it is that the CAII might have slightly more contrast and saturation but color is excellent.

I have experienced papers that did not print some films well. Years ago I operated a minilab printer that used Konica paper and the Kodak films, especially the Portra films, printed terribly. They were hard to color balance, skin tones looked like mud and there was the appearance of crossover in the prints. Konica films, of course, printed well. At one point we switched to Mitsubishi paper with similar results.

I'll add that when we were scanning film at the lab some of the best color I saw from our Kodak HR500 scanner came off of a film I remember as Max400 or maybe it was Ultramax.

railwayman3 · Feb 15, 2015

Photo Engineer said:
The answer is: "that depends".

At Kodak, the paper is designed with broad sensitivity and so the film dyes become less important. It also allowed use at KRL to make changes to the film with less or no consequence to the final print. However, Fuji and Agfa used different paper sensitizers which at one time made it more difficult to print Kodak film with their papers.

It was generally true that Agfa, Fuji and Kodak onto Kodak paper worked well but Kodak and Agfa onto Fuji paper was less acceptable or shall we say harder to get that really good print hidden in the negative. I have heard that this problem is either much less or does not exist in the most recent films and papers, but I cannot confirm it.

PE

That's fascinating, thanks, and thinking about it, logical. So my old Dad was more right than I thought when he insisted on Agfa negs on Agfa paper. (Been checking out some of his negs and prints, and there are also some Kodak onto Kodak paper which also look good. Also I noticed a few on Konica paper, at a quick review some of these look rather "milky" colors.)

Photo Engineer · Feb 15, 2015

Well, there is also the quality of the paper to consider!

Konica was very good, but some were not. I remember one shipment of Agfa paper that was sent to New Orleans and got caught in a dockworkers dispute and sat on a hot summer dock and spoiled. That caused a lot of problems before the whole thing was ironed out.

PE

Kodak Gold on Fuji Paper

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