Most color accurate film?

Prof_Pixel · Jun 8, 2012

DREW WILEY said:
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

Digital techniques can easily give an image different color reproduction 'look and feel'; if it was OK for Technicolor to do this (adjust the 'look and feel') why is it not OK to do so digitally.

As for color accuracy... PE may remember that in the mid-80s, Kodak, who had always prided itself on accurate color reproduction, found that Fuji was taking over the consumer color negative film that produced the 'color you remembered' rather than the 'color that was there'. If they shot their house in August, they wanted green grass and blue skys and not the color accurate brown-green grass and muddy sky. We used digital techniques to produce image samples with many different color and contrast reproduction to develop a new family of consumer negative films (I believe the KODACOLOR VR-G 35 Films).

Like it or not, digital technology and analog technology are firmly intertwined in photography.

Ian Grant · Jun 8, 2012

Prof_Pixel said:
Kodak, who had always prided itself on accurate color reproduction, found that Fuji was taking over the consumer color negative film that produced the 'color you remembered' rather than the 'color that was there'. If they shot their house in August, they wanted green grass and blue skys and not the color accurate brown-green grass and muddy sky. We used digital techniques to produce image samples with many different color and contrast reproduction to develop a new family of consumer negative films (I believe the KODACOLOR VR-G 35 Films).

Like it or not, digital technology and analog technology are firmly intertwined in photography.

Interesting comments. I started colour photography with Kodaclor negs and home processed Pavelle prints, also Ferrania slide film which I home processed but I'd grew up with my father shootong Kodachrome then Kodachrome II.

The first color materials that I found realistic were pre C41 Agfa colour negative films {1972-4)and in particular K25. I found E4(3) colour tansparenies harsh but the E4 Fujichrome was excellent, it suited our weather conditions in the UK.

With the advent of E6 the newer Fuji films 50D & 100D were streets ahead. Having said that though often it was subtle nuances, and some labs were better with Fuji materials and others with Kodak.

Here in the UK Fuji films were so consistent, Kodak's Professional transparency films had filter factors for each batch (talking about the 70's) and so pros switched.

But you make an important point because colour accuracy is a fudge to suit the greater masses

The most realistic colour images I've ever seen were Autochromes .

Ian

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

Digital gear is good at mimicking this or that look, but at this point in time simply doesn't have the
range to do anything like real Technicolor or dye transfer work. With the kind of budgets that Hollywood and the CIA or DEA have they could probably invent something custom. But unfortunatley
they seem to be going backwards and are putting an emphasis on digital movies simply to control
the market and keep the fancy car-crash scenes going. The NSA did have real film capability (cumulative with their special enlargers) to far exceed the quality of ordinary color film. I don't know
if they have now switched entirely to satellite survelliance - but at one point not long ago they still
wanted true-color 9X9 aerial film. It's a lot easier to evaluate than false-color electronic images, and
they didn't even allow digital equip in the same lab lest somebody try something hanky-panky. Take
a look at all the saturated colors at opposite sides of the color wheel in some of the later Technicolor
movies - they're just in a different league than anything done now, and the set designers knew how
to exploit that unique characteristic. The colors are alive, vivid, clean. Same goes for a well-made
dye-transfer print of the same subject. Everything else looks contaminated. I can get a well-balanced print of the Macbeath chart with all kinds of fim; but a real dye transfer print from a chrome with match the original chart way better. I would be even better still if captured the tricolor
method on straight-line black-and-white film.

hrst · Jun 8, 2012

Diapositivo said:
PE, if I get you right, you mean that given a certain film, and given a certain light temperature which we give as normal (the one for which the film is balanced) we should adopt a fixed filtration (determined once and for all for a certain set of film/light temperature) and that should work fine in most situation.
In hybrid work, I suppose this means that I should actually take picture of a known colour patch, create a "film profile", and use that filtration without further ado.

That makes sense to me. It should restrict the need for manual filtration to situation where the light quality differs substantially from the one the film was designed for, or when the filtering is to be adopted to a certain aesthetic - not "objective" - look, such as in situations where we want to arbitrarily choose the degree of reddish/purplish/yellowish quality of light in a twilight image.

This is exactly what I meant by "reference". Color negative can be printed in a controlled process to a "standard" print which yields the standard color balance. Then, this print is a visual reference, just like the slide. Of course, if the light is different, the print will have some color casts, but so would the slide, too!

If you look at the film carton, it shows the color temperature it is meant for, typically 5600K, or 3200K for tungsten balanced films. It means a gray card shot at this light gives a proper gray densities in the film - this is standardized, so it does NOT give some random result as often stated by many. And, when printed, it gives a proper gray. If not, the printing filtration needs to be adjusted. This way, a standard printing condition can be achieved. It stays very constant even with different brands of films. I have seen only one exception; Fuji Reala had to be printed with less magenta filtration.

In practice, for accurate work, many like to add a gray card, color checker card or some other known visual reference in the scene; this is same for both slide and negative.

And, it is worth mentioning how inaccurate "visual references" are. As I stated before, the colors perceived from a slide may vary VASTLY depending on how the slide is looked at. For example, if one looks at the slide with a typical halogen projector, and then the slide is sent to press using cool-light fluorescent light boxes, the result is completely different. Also, different people have different vision, and vision adapts. We have auto white balance and autocontrast in our eyes. This is why I presented difference between big light box, small light box and a masked light box with only the slide area visible.

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

The problem with color neg films in the real world as opposed to a controlled setting is that one part
of the curve might require one kind of color temp filtration, another part soemthing different. Mixed
lighting or color casts in shadows become an issue. With chromes, when something split people just
said this is a good use of the film - like the blue bias of old Ektachrome 64. With negs you don't know
what's there, and then the mfg figures if there's going to be a bias, it's got to be on the warm side
to keep skintones "natural" even though the scene itself contains something else. Ektar is a little
different in this respect. Too bad. Chromes had to look best on a lightbox or projector, negs in an
album after Aunt Maud pushed the button and Kodak did the rest. But speaking of negs, I learned
quite a bit about how they REALLY work from Hollywood photographers. Some of these guys take for
granted the need to properly expose all the respective dye layers using color balancing filters. Every
smart ass with Fauxtoshop thinks he can simply post-correct it. But once the color layers are cross
contaminated, that's it. You can change saturation and contrast, but hues per se are inalterably
muddied. Chromes do a better job of separating them, but only within that range till things go off
scale, and then some sort of bias kicks in, which was typically turned sheer black and ignored by
any number of repro methods, including a black printer added to CMY.

Prof_Pixel · Jun 8, 2012

DREW WILEY said:
But once the color layers are cross contaminated, that's it. You can change saturation and contrast, but hues per se are inalterably muddied.

Much color cross contamination can be removed digitally using matrixing techniques (the new Red value is some function of the old Red, Green and Blue values. The same for the new Green and Blue values. It's something that can't be done in the analog world.
The digital world offers MANY useful techniques beyond the tools in Photoshop.

DREW WILEY · Jun 8, 2012

It was done in the analog world for over half a century before anything digital even existed. That's
how they got the red out of the Ektachrome greens and turned them into something vibrant long
before Fuji came out with a chrome which actually picked up on that kind of color. With Kodachrome
you had to correct differently. There's tons of old literature on this stuff. You'd be amazed just how sophistacted masking got. But that wasn't what I was referring to anyway.

markbarendt · Jun 8, 2012

Diapositivo said:
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.

Yes, the calibration is possible in theory.

To get an acceptable result though, you typically need controlled lighting. In a studio that's not to tough. In the wild light gets mixed. Filtration (camera or enlarger) doesn't automatically fix mixed lighting, artificial lighting may be needed or even the best way to balance the lighting color in the scene.

Photo Engineer · Jun 8, 2012

I have said before and will say it again....

I use one color balance for negatives from about 1950 to present, usually with no correction but sometimes very tiny corrections of 0.05 or 0.10 or thereabouts. The only exception was the "Universal Kodacolor of the '60s which was a universal failure.

PE

Prof_Pixel · Jun 8, 2012

DREW WILEY said:
Digital gear is good at mimicking this or that look, but at this point in time simply doesn't have the
range to do anything like real Technicolor or dye transfer work.

Digital technology continues to evolve; the first digital camera I worked on and used (the original Kodak DCS) is VERY primitive by today's standards ... but that was about 25 years ago.

Interestingly enough, digital technology is responsible for the decline of dye transfer. Through the '80s most large dye transfer work was used to make prints that could be retouched and airbrushed for advertising shots. Digital photocomp made the retouching MUCH better, easier and cheaper.

When I was helping develop the Kodak Premier Image Enhancement System (which was film in, digital enhancement / photo composition and then film out) in the mid-80s, I visited many commercial labs around the US and was amazed the at darkroom magic they could perform in the photo composition process. They loved the Premier system because they got better results at lower cost. BTW, at that time they wanted film out because the film gave them a color reference point that prepress operators around the world could use to maintain image quality. Now about 25 years later digital color calibration techniques no longer require a film reference.

BTW, I guess the point I'm trying to make in all this is that analog and digital are just different tools that work well together - and I was saying this in presentations I made back in the '90s.

DREW WILEY · Jun 11, 2012

Indeed. I just prefer the more tactile approach of working with real film and the challenge of figuring
out new tricks with it. Multiple-mask techniques with 8X10 would be prohitively expensive for me
if I didn't have the forethought to stockpile supplies in the freezer before the current severe price
increases. Dye transfer looks like a fun retirement hobby until those supplies run out too. And one can only crank out so much of that stuff. RA4 is really the future of affordable color printing. Masking
when needed is generally very simple, and it's actually way cheaper to print in a real darkroom than
digitially, unless of course one has their own commercial lab. Of course, I'm speaking of high-end
big stuff, not just printing for fun. I'm not going to invest in newer technology at this point in life,
given its almost instant obsolescene and am in fact eager to get away from all this carpal-tunnel torture stuff entirely.

Old-N-Feeble · Jun 11, 2012

Yeah, the Kodak DCS200's were real dogs by today's standards but the AF was determined to move "forward". I didn't mind... I was learning new stuff like Photoshop 2.0.

nworth · Jun 12, 2012

I looked into this in some detail a few years age. No color film is really accurate, and the accuracy varies a lot depending on the light and the subject. Visually, the last version of Kodachorme was really the best. That didn't always translate into scanning and printing. No E-6 product came even close to Kodachrome or any of the negative films. Among the negative films, Portra 160VC was the best at that time, and was really very good. Ohters were considerably less accurate, to my eyes. Portra films have moved away from this level of accuracy in the past couple of changes, but I think Portra 160 may still win.

DREW WILEY · Jun 12, 2012

I worked with 160VC quite a bit, esp in 8x10, and it still had quite a few gamut issues, esp in the
warmtones, aka fleshtone areas, where it has real trouble differentiating various shades of yellow and orange. I could cite many other issues which were solved in chromes long ago. Kodachrome had
plenty of issues of its own. But you are correct, no film is truly realistic, and you need to choose them per specific application. The problem with negs is that a strong mask is already in place, so any supplementary masking has to be very subtle. With chromes you could introduce rather radical
corrections - which were in fact generally introduced during high quality traditional printing methods
like dye transfer. People simply ignored this with negs because this was considered a convenience
medium. It doesn't mean neg film didn't warrant further correction. I can get cleaner hues with Ektar
than with 160VC, and I don't merely mean more saturated color. Reproduction of pleasing skintones,
however, is largely dependant upon creating complex neutrals to begin with - the same kind of thing
which amounts to veiling mud in landscape photography.

amsp · Jun 12, 2012

Wow, this thread really took on a life of it's own. Seven pages of really interesting discussion, but I don't really feel like I got a lot of answers to my initial question. Not that I'm complaining, like I said it's been an interesting read. Maybe if I rephrase my question, if you were shooting say a painting reproduction on film today, using flash for controlled and consistent color temp, using a color chart for color correction in post, which film would get me the closest to the original before applying color correction?

Prof_Pixel · Jun 12, 2012

amsp said:
Maybe if I rephrase my question, if you were shooting say a painting reproduction on film today, using flash for controlled and consistent color temp, using a color chart for color correction in post, which film would get me the closest to the original before applying color correction?

In THIS case (wanting to match a painting) I'd shoot digital and use some of the various color matching applications available to produce the desired output (color print) that would very closely match the original. (Note that colored dyes will probably never exactly match the paint pigments in all viewing lighting conditions.)

Photo Engineer · Jun 12, 2012

And if you did it with film, Portra 160 would be my bet.

PE

DREW WILEY · Jun 12, 2012

I'm sure eager to actually print my Portra 160 control shots and not just guess from densitometer
readings etc. Just to anticipate versatility I did some masked dupes too, based upon previous experience with 160VC. Then comes the fine tuning. I sure hope that now we're right at the top of
color neg quality the next step won't be right over a cliff, and we lose the product line. It's already
happened to Ektar sheet film, undeniably less versatile than Portra, but unsurpassed for certain
applications. My freezer is stuffed and my wallet is empty.

markbarendt · Jun 12, 2012

Prof_Pixel said:
In THIS case (wanting to match a painting) I'd shoot digital and use some of the various color matching applications available to produce the desired output (color print) that would very closely match the original. (Note that colored dyes will probably never exactly match the paint pigments in all viewing lighting conditions.)

You do know this is APUG right?

Suggesting digital here when somebody asks for info about film could be considered trolling.

DREW WILEY · Jun 12, 2012

I don't personally mind the digital input when it is a valid comparison. For example, he made
reference to a manner of independently controlling color correction per dye layer, and I mentioned
the possibility of doing this thru film masking too (though neglected to state that it generally requires
tricolor separations first) - really analogous - one method learning from the other. So this is really neither one versus the other or a hybrid question - but for me at least, a way to suggest, what if?
In other words, the digital versus analog war dialogue can benefit both camps without necessarily
compromising either. At least in this particular case, I appreciate his input.

Prof_Pixel · Jun 12, 2012

markbarendt said:
Suggesting digital here when somebody asks for info about film could be considered trolling.

I've always believed in matching the tool to the job and feel that digital technology should be just another tool in a photographers toolkit.

Old-N-Feeble · Jun 12, 2012

Yes, but not everyone is so open-minded. Just be ready for those analog-only folks to openly complain and "report" posts, a.k.a. "tell daddy on you".

Prof_Pixel · Jun 12, 2012

Old-N-Feeble said:
Yes, but not everyone is so open-minded.:

Sadly, some people always view anything new as a threat rather than an opportunity. I started with analog photography in the early '50s and have worked with everything from subminiture to 4x5. As an engineer, I love technology; and that includes embracing new technology as well as old technology.

amsp · Jun 12, 2012

Prof_Pixel said:
In THIS case (wanting to match a painting) I'd shoot digital and use some of the various color matching applications available to produce the desired output (color print) that would very closely match the original. (Note that colored dyes will probably never exactly match the paint pigments in all viewing lighting conditions.)

I've been shooting color critical work with digital for almost 10 years, I wasn't asking if I should shoot film or digital but rather what film to use IF I wanted to go that route. So far it seems Portra 160 is getting the most votes.

Prof_Pixel · Jun 12, 2012

amsp said:
I've been shooting color critical work with digital for almost 10 years, I wasn't asking if I should shoot film or digital but rather what film to use IF I wanted to go that route.

Then I agree with my friend Ron: "And if you did it with film, Portra 160 would be my bet"

Most color accurate film?

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