Most color accurate film?

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

Color neg films have inherent problems dumping yellow-oranges into skintones and being unable to
differentiate hues in this zone, and still quite a problem with cyan infecting yellow-greens. Ektar and
to some extend Portra 400 and now disc 160VC are better in the latter category, but far from ideal.
Blue-violets are also a difficult area in which chromes surpass. But no film is in the league of direct
in-camera color separation. I doubt that many commercial photographers can afford the newer forensic style camera used by museums, though some affordable digital system might be around the
corner someday. Chromes can be easily masked to outperform basic negative for color correction
purposes, obviously not for exposure range. But truly critical color work is generally done under
controlled studio or lab conditions anyway. Heck, I effect mask color negs to correct them. But the
sheer cost of using multiple sheets of 8X10 film is a serious limiting factor these days.

Old-N-Feeble · Jun 8, 2012

Wow... I see more than the usual degree of informational disparity in this thread. For a noob to high quality hybrid photography like me this is confusing. In most cases I can wade through the muck with enough research. This subject will require a bit more time than usual. Oops... what did I just step in? Awe... DANG... who left that there?!?

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

The "moth on rock" question: It all depends on the exact hue of the moth and of the rock that you
want to reproduce. One film might handle certain nuances of grey or greige or whatever better than
another. There's no silver bullet. You get accustomed to what the film will or will not do, but in
combination with your total workflow, right up to the print. For every print media has its own idiosyncrasies and gamut issues too, generally more problematic than the film itself. Chromes were
standard for stock photography because an editor can see what is there. And back then, color
negs were truly horrible for most things other than skintones, though such color errors were elegantly used for "fine art" purposes by certain individuals. It's simply amazing how good these new
Portra and Ektar films are, but in certain color relationships they still can't replace chromes. It's damn
easier to print color negs, once you learn how to "read" them. Scanning is an option either way,
but I still prefer real darkroom results.

Old-N-Feeble · Jun 8, 2012

I'm not sure I understand. Color negs are bad or good for skin tones?

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

My Old n' Feeble friend... yes, a disparity of opinions. My Ron's perspective, he's correct. I'm referring to a more discrete set of parameters and something like hypothetical color matching other
than skintones. I got good enough at Ciba to get portrait commissions with it, and it's a print media
way more color idiosyncratic than any film issue per se. Cole Weston did wonderful portraits and
nudes etc with chrome film and Cibachrome. For skintones I'd much rather use any modern color
neg film (except Ektar). But mastering one's specific chosen medium is far more important than the
details of what goes into it. Objective color matching, like copying paintings for quality reproduction,
is on another league. There accuracy takes on a different nuance than presentable or pleasing with
respect to color. And within their narrower engineered range of exposure, duplicating chrome would
do a better job with certain hues - certainly not everything! I'm still on the learning curve with the
latest Ektar films in terms of color in nature, where you can't control the illumination except to temp
balance.

Athiril · Jun 8, 2012

Portrait films like Portra are best for skin tones, so much so I've been able to push the colour balance (towards red and yellow to warm up and accentuate autumn colours) off neutral in tough situations, but the skin tones still hold. As opposed to digital of the same image at neutral where skin tones have already been contaminated with red, and I've needed to do more than a simple colour balance.

Diapositivo · Jun 8, 2012

DREW WILEY said:
But no film is in the league of direct
in-camera color separation. I doubt that many commercial photographers can afford the newer forensic style camera used by museums, though some affordable digital system might be around the
corner someday.

If I understand well, you mean that for accurate reproduction cameras working with three films for each frame are in use? Could you provide information on some producer, maybe opening another thread? I think this would be a very interesting topic for APUG.

Helen B · Jun 8, 2012

More than three exposures are made - usually about seven - for more accurate colour rendition using multispectral imaging. It's all digital origination as far as I know...

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

In the old days, if you could move the artwork to the camera, you simply did halftone separations in
camera using mutliple exposures. Some of these cameras were huge. I was given one 22 feet long
and cannibalized it just for the apo lenses and pin registration easel. Remarkable color work was done in studio using registered back in solid large format cameras, making sequential continuous-tone separations on films like Super-XX for dye transfer printing. You can still do that, of course,
given a sheet film like Tmax. In the field things tend to move between exposures, so tricolor cameras
were made, and for movies, complex Technicolor cameras. A few people are restoring those old things, or trying to invent new ones. Color photography by such means seventy-five years ago was
often better than any color film can provide today. But you couldn't hang a rig like that around your
neck, much less make phone calls on it too!

Photo Engineer · Jun 8, 2012

It is true that color negative films are built to the same rigid speed specifications as reversal films. Thus, over a period of time, color negative printing should be as constant as reversal results.

It is also true that the C41 process is more stable than the E6 process due to the use of 2 developers in E6, a high pH color developer, and a reversal step, all of which add variables that must be controlled.

If you talk about the use of color reversal in magazines and ads, then you must consider that the editors want to pick out a slide visually, but then the slide must be masked in the lab before printing in the magazine. This introduces the exact same masking step that is built into masked color negative films. But, color neg films also include a hefty dose of interimage effects due to DIR couplers which further adjust the image quality.

If color reversal were better, you can believe that Hollywood would be using color reversal instead of color negative.

Now, to give a specific example of color neg vs color pos in terms of color and image quality, I suggest that you photograph a red knit sweater with both films and then compare scans of both. I say scans because this can normalize the conditions as far as is possible. You will find that the knit pattern (weave) will be nearly absent in the reversal film. This is an effect called cyan undercut, and it also smooths out complexions and other reddish tinted objects with detail. It is a common fault with reversal films and is due to all of the color imperfections mentioned above.

PE

markbarendt · Jun 8, 2012

Diapositivo said:
Considering how "easier" it is to use negative rather than slides, it strikes me, at this point, as completely irrational that stock agencies have had this strong preference for slide film when it all boiled down to preparing a dozen or so filtrations profiles (and then asking work to be handed in one of the films in the list) which is a work to be made una tantum.

This approach of determining a standard filtration for a certain film and using it always makes more sense, to me, than trying to find a "neutral" element in the picture.

Matching slides has the advantage of matching intent, rather than reality. The agency can say "I like it this way, print it to look the same", takes a variable out of the equation.

Standard filtration works very well at providing the "real" color in the light the film was intended for. The problem is that your subject isn't always lit exclusively by the intended light source.

For a sunset portrait, if your subject is lit by the sun it will appear warmer than normal.

If the subject is lit by the sky, with their back to the sunset, their face will appear colder/bluer than normal.

In both situations the film should provide the "real" color, but not a normal skin tone.

Both those situations differ in color temperature from mid-morning shots or even daylight balanced strobes.

All of these situations are variations of "daylight color balance" situations.

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

Just missed a couple of late posts. There are probably some old threads about tricolor cameras somewhere on APUG. If not you can find them on the Large Format and Dye Transfer forums. Sometimes old Devin or Curtis tricolor cameras come up for sale, but they a tremendous amount of
work to recondition using modern materials. You could design something far better if you were a
good machinist with optical engineering skills too, or else, had the kind of budget that NASA or the
NSA does! For inifinity use where no parallax correction was needed you could simply affix three
different cameras aimed at exactly the same focal point, and use a different primary filter over each
one. Realigning the images is much easier in PS, but pin registration could also be used. At some point in time it might be possible to do it digitally in the field, but at the moment the range of digital
capture if less than conventional black and white films. The early studio Sinar digital system called
Epolux was a sequential RGB exposure method. You could probably get those components free today,
if they haven't already been tossed out. In other words, hundred year old film technology still works
and is practical. Twenty year old digital technology is already landfill.

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

Gotta disagree with you again, Ron. I've done Ciba portraits even from old school chromes where you
could count every stitch in the suit. The reds were better detailed than anything I can get with a
neg today. Dye transfer reds could be incredibly nuanced. There were several reason why chromes were standard for reproduction usage. Another problem was that color negs had a reputation for being fugitive. I never had that issue myself. But the stock agencies would hold onto sheet film images for decades and didn't want something half-faded, or that differered from lot to lot
as far as reproduction parameters. My own brother sometimes got five grand for one-time rights to publish a 4x5 stock shot. That was a lot of money back in the 60's. Now in the digital age, if you got ten bucks you'd be lucky. I can't imagine photo editors back then trying to choose between
a stack of color negs. That kind of thing was for wedding photographers and the pro labs which
routinely work with them. In general, I find that the perspective of you mfg folks differs quite a bit
from the category of fine printmakers who have worked in these distinctions for most of a lifetime.
But I could also mention a few notable exceptions to my side of the fence, who preferred color negs
even for color carbro work. A lot depends on the specific result one seeks.

Athiril · Jun 8, 2012

I've am end user. After going through many phases, I've settled on negs being better - for everything pretty much. Even for slide projection than slide film. (Neg to Print film).

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

Masking - color masking is built-in with negs.. Convenient but fixed. With a transparency you can fine tune it to more specific parameters by having the mask separate. My friend Joseph Holmes once wrote an interesting article for View Camera magazine explaining why chromes are actually more flexible than negs, before he left the dark side and became an Epson consultant. In fact there are people who wish a neg film were made without the corrective masking. I get around this by double masking - corrective interpositive prior to the supplemental mask itself. But high-end chrome printing sometimes took many masks. Dye transfer is worse for film consumption, unless you've got
a film-recorder like Jim does. All depends on whether you like darkroom work or not. It's either frustrating or fun. I'm in the latter camp. But there's never a silver bullet. Sometimes I carry both
chrome and neg sheet film because on subject might respond best to one, another to the other.

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

There you go Ron. When Hollwood wanted top-quality color they went Technicolor, not color neg!
They needed the neg films for convenience, budget, and lighting latitude. It was the cheap way out,
not the quality one. As I understand it, all those cameras and dyes are still around in storage in Asia,
and might not ever see action again due to electronic capture, which certainly isn't its equal either,
just more convenient and affordable. Now I'm firmly in the color neg camp myself because I have no
choice. Other than a few older chromes getting dye transfer printed, RA4 is all that's left for routine
work. If I was younger and starting from scratch I'd learn color carbon.

Diapositivo · Jun 8, 2012

markbarendt said:
Matching slides has the advantage of matching intent, rather than reality. The agency can say "I like it this way, print it to look the same", takes a variable out of the equation.

Standard filtration works very well at providing the "real" color in the light the film was intended for. The problem is that your subject isn't always lit exclusively by the intended light source.

For a sunset portrait, if your subject is lit by the sun it will appear warmer than normal.

If the subject is lit by the sky, with their back to the sunset, their face will appear colder/bluer than normal.

In both situations the film should provide the "real" color, but not a normal skin tone.

Both those situations differ in color temperature from mid-morning shots or even daylight balanced strobes.

All of these situations are variations of "daylight color balance" situations.

Yes but the fact remains that if stock agencies, and/or printers, had a standard filter pack calibrated for a certain film/enlarger/paper combination, they could print a positive "proof" and would have the same "as intended" visual "reference". They would choose between positive prints rather than slides, but with the same degree of confidence in the final result.

If, for instance, a slide user takes some shots under shade and blue light and uses a certain degree of "skylight" filter to compensate for the bluish tint, so that his result is a certain slide with certain in-camera corrected colours, which are immediately visible "as they are" to the printer, by the same token the same photographer can use the same skylight filter (ok not the same, the filter could be slightly different because the film is different) and come out with a certain in-camera corrected negative, which is the result of his accurate colour compensation of the bluish light, and even though the negative itself would normally give no clue about the exact colours, the "standard" proof print, with the standard filter pack in the calibrated film/enlarger/paper combination, should give exactly the image as intended by the photographer.

If calibration is done properly, the filter pack of the photographer's combination, the agency's combination and the printer's combination might well be different, but the "absolute" colour (or should I say "perceptual", as perceived by the average human eye) in the prints should be the same.

Said in one sentence, if a proper calibration work is performed then the negative should, in theory, have the same degree of WYSIWY(can)G quality, from film to print, that slide film allows.

Athiril · Jun 8, 2012

Overly complicated, convoluted, difficult, and expensive (and often redundant things) = Flexibility. While simple, cost effective, accurate, and convenient things (such as latitude) is merely cheap.

DREW WILEY said:
flexible...double masking...corrective interpositive...prior to the supplemental mask...high-end chrome printing sometimes took many masks.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Old-N-Feeble · Jun 8, 2012

Drew... There's never any image in which everything is at infinity so paralax with three cameras will always be an issue... timing too with most subjects. Astrophotography is close enough for sure but typical earthly photography? I don't think so. There was at least one tricolor camera made that split a single incoming image with mirrors to share on three sheets of B&W film. But I'm sure one of those would have to be reconditioned and calibrated... if you can even find one.

Photo Engineer · Jun 8, 2012

Hollywood abandoned reversal originals as soon as a masked color negative was available. When Technicolor came out, there was no color negative material out there for Hollywood to use.

Don't confuse the timing issue with what was desired or needed.

PE

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

The history was complex Ron. And Technicolor movies could still be hypothetically be made today if
someone had the resolve and budget. If so, it would probably be Bollywood and not Hollywood.
My perspective is from the end result - no color neg film is capable of that kind of gamut or that
particular look. Of course, movie sets were essentially big studios where costume colors and lighting
ratios were largely controlled. I miss the finesses of it all, even in black and white films, where digital
manipulation has become a substitute for real camera skills. But technicolor was especially flexible
in that particular dye sets could be selected for the overall decor or costuming or whatever. Just
like still dye transfer printing - I don't see anything its equal yet for gamut, though it's been long
surpassed for convenience. But all this discussion is nuanced from both perspective and nostalgia.
That Macbeath chart printed from current Kodak neg material is starting to look damn good, though
a bit of supplementary masking is still needed. Color temp problems in nature are a different issue.
Easy enough to get a high-quality commercial level print. Personal standards are something else
altogether.

Diapositivo · Jun 8, 2012

DREW WILEY said:
In fact there are people who wish a neg film were made without the corrective masking.

Just for information, probably not universally widespread, Rollei CN200, actually produced by Agfa, is a negative film without orange mask. I do have some rolls in the fridge, patiently waiting for the photographer to begin developing in C-41, which is probably going to happen end of summer.
Probably just like the CR200 (reversal film produced by Agfa), the CN200 might be produced mainly for aeroreconnaissance - aerophotography work. It's not a product specifically designed for photography "as we know it". I'll post scans as soon as they are available. I understand filtering will be a bit problematic

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

(Got interrupted)... I'd just add that even at my admittedly beginner level of dye transfer printing
skills, the MacBeath chart in DT blows away the Portra equivalent. You don't notice all the dirt still
in color negs until you have something better to compare it with. Ciba looks far better for certain
kinds of colors, but is very idiosyncratic with other hues. The achilles heel of DT has long been that
he range between light blue and more cyan turquoises. In that specific arena Ektar is stellar. I took
my 4x5 and Ektar to the islands recently for exactly one color shot (the wife's vacation, so not the
correct situation for a photo expedition per se) - those tropical turquoise waters will come out magnificent. And some of the strange browns in the lava will do wonderfully - better than a chrome.
But I tailored my film selection for this setting per se. If I was shooting in general I would have taken
more than one film.

Photo Engineer · Jun 8, 2012

Color negatives can indeed be made without masking and yield pastel colors. However, with a proper set of DIR couplers or balanced iodide for interimage effects, a suitable unmasked negative can be made. Not perfect, but suitable. Just because it is made does not mean that it is good.

I am so frustrated when people ignore the generational problems printing pos-pos. The film gets a dupey look to it. Yes, Hollywood even gave it a name, "dupey". When you print curve to curve the result loses shadow and highlight detail beause it is a multiplication of the two curves. Neg-pos is straight line to straight line and preserves detail. Hollywood abandoned pos-pos as fast as they could and only use it for special effects now when that "dupey" look is desired. When an "expert" is unaware of this very fact, it reveals how little they really know about photographic systems and printing.

PE

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

Yeah, that would have been volume duping if there ever was such a thing. With stills, EDupe of the
ever better CDUII would take multi-generation duping and remain faithful, provided of course, that
supplemental silver masking was including with each respective step. In fact, I did most of my big
Ciba work this way.. not from the original but from a very precise dupe with all the corrections built
in. Too bad most of those will go to waste since I only have enough Ciba paper for about a dozen
more images. They work good for contacting to internegs too, since the masking is essentialy built
in to the chrome, but color reproduction might or might not work ideally. Velvia was a bad starting
point, and is less than ideal even for dye transfer printing. I'm interested to see how my latest round
of Portra 160 internegs turn out, but haven't had the chance to actually print them yet. But I am
certain that the version taken from a RTP standard chrome will be a little more faithful than the
E100G version.

Most color accurate film?

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