Old Fuji Archive paper.

[digiconvert]

Have some 8x10 paper from ebay, no idea on date but cold stored. My limited experience has been with Supra Endura and I find the Fuji a lot more difficult to nail in terms of filtration. Very little magenta is needed if any to get close to a print. Is this Fuji or the age of the paper ?

Cheers CJB

 

[Paul Green]

Hi I may not be as experienced at colour printing as most but I have found the same when hand printing on Fuji CA. I used Fuji CA all of last university year and this year tried Kodak endura and found it a lot easier, printing from both Fuji and Kodak negatives. Though this could be because our RA4 machine uses Kodak chems, but I have a feeling it shouldnt make a difference.

Paul.

 

[pentaxuser]

CJB This has been mentioned on other threads as well. I noticed that as little as 2 units of magenta on a Durst Dichroic head can make a noticeable difference. I'ts been a while since I used Kodak but I started off on Kodak stock I got from the seller of the Jobo processor I bought to do colour printing. It was Kodak Supra III I think and I then got Supra Endura. No problems with either. It seemed to have a greater tolerance which of course I only discovered after changing over for no better reason than the Fuji CA was being sold by Keyphoto more cheaply than Kodak.

Once I finish my Fuji batch and based on comments I have seen, I think I will revert to Kodak. Some stockists sell Kodak more cheaply than Fuji and others are vice versa.

It might be that Fuji CA is ideal for fast very accurate minilabs with top notch analysers but I am no longer so sure about it for home processing in terms of its user friendliness.

I should add that there is little doubt Fuji paper is capable of great colour rendition and balance as evidenced by my local mini-lab (as little as 2 hours turnaround if it isn't busy). My wife uses it as she doesn't have the patience to wait for my snail's pace printing.

pentaxuser

 

[digiconvert]

Thanks for that both. I just managed to get a good print on CA using a multimask as a test printer with various filtrations. Thought I had it sorted, programmed the Labometer (which is wonderful on portra) for a new paper then tried at 8 x 10 - print has a green cast and is little density. Think I'll stick to Portra , only a fiver lost on ebay, might use it for printing cross processed slides

If anyone is interested Morco sell endura at good prices , far cheaper than the likes of Firstcall . http://www.morco.uk.com/latest/kodak_supra_endura.htm

Cheers ; Chris Benton

 

[pentaxuser]

Chris. Yes. PE will be interested in this. Morco seems to have thrown its weight behind Kodak products in the C41 and RA4 areas. Morco wasn't always a value for money site in the past.

pentaxuser

 

[Richard Harris]

Digiconvert, the filtration needed by fuji and Kodak will be quite different but this doesn't mean a fault. Fuji normally requires less I think but it is of little importance once the balance is found. I am puzzled by the findings of many posters that Fuji is less tolerant. Surely if a paper was significantly less tolerant then it would have to be significantly less colourful. After all a negative is just changing the filtration reaching the paper. However there seems to be a consensus that Fuji gives a less pleasing palette of colours with Kodak film than vice versa. One other point. ebay is awash with packs of Fuji CA type MP paper with a green and red label. The Fuji rep at Focus in the UK told me that Fuji hadn't produced that paper in years and that it was certainly out of date now and would have a poor dmin i.e. messy whites. Some UK retailers are still shipping this paper I think. It is very hard to avoid a colour cast on paper with a base fog. You try to avoid the fog colour by filtering in colour to hide it. The result at best is duller, greyer colours.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Richard;

A paper and negative can be made that will not tolerate any other film/paper combination. An example would be a film with a cyan dye at 650 nm and a paper with sensitivity there. They are matched. A film as above, printed on a paper with sensitivity at 700 nm would show crossover.

Fuji paper generally has a shorter and more narrow red and blue sensitization than Kodak papers. As a result, they tend to produce crossover with some films that do not match it perfectly. Kodak OTOH, uses very broad sensitizations to make it work with all possible films.

Now, for filter pack. Since all emulsions are blue sensitive, and for stability reasons and speed reasons, the yellow layer is on the bottom of paper, not the top, then all layers can see blue light and therefore they can form cyan and magenta dye based on blue exposure.

To solve this problem, Kodak has used a blue layer which is at least 1.5 log E faster than the other two layers, and a magenta layer which is at least 0.6 log E faster than the cyan layer. This has three results. It renders the mask colorless to the paper, giving the paper a higher relative speed. It allows the use of only M and Y filters, and last but not least, it filters out the blue sensitivity of the C and M dye forming layers.

So, a paper yellow will be purer the higher into the red the filter pack is, and will be more of a pumpkin shade the lower the red in the filter pack. The ideal filter pack of course, is achieved with tricolor printing which gives the colors with the most purity.

Kodak paper is optimized at about 50R.

PE

 

[Richard Harris]

P E Don't know if I've got this exactly so you may wish to discourse further. I'd like you to. The
chosen solutions arrived at by Fuji and Kodak I presume can not be wildly apart, if remaining distinctive from each other. When you say that the higher the red filtration the purer the yellows can you elaborate. My dialing in of what I consider neutral filtration by adding cyan, yellow and magenta is just that isn't it? neutral density. Incidentally, I do not use equal quantities, I just dial in say 40 cyan and let the analyser zero by adding yellow and magenta. I figured that the sensitometry of the analyser is more accurate than the positioning of graded filters in the head. It doesn't tend to be a lot different anyhow. I must stress that I get good colour balance from negatives processed by others, labs and from different film stock, first time, however; I still have this fine tune problem which displays between one print and another,even when the same negative and filtration are used back to back and both are processed in the same printo roller transport machine within seconds.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Richard;

I can only tell you that a manufacturer of negative - positive color products can come to a design solution to the two products which can exclude other products from the loop by degrading their performance. This choice can be accidental or deliberate in the sense that 'accidental' comes from not testing all combinations whereas 'deliberate' comes from a design choice for a good feature that overrules other considerations.

A neutral density is a neutral density, and there is no problem with that.

As for filtration affecting color reproduction, imagine a single layer cyan sensitive to red light. If you expose it to green light you get nothing. If you expose it to red light you get something, and if you expose it to blue light you get something - and this is the native speed of the emulsion, to blue light. So, you have to remove it somehow.

This is done by making the real yellow layer which is blue sensitive many stops faster than the blue speed of the cyan layer. Then you add yellow filtration to slow the blue down, and in the process the cyan layer loses effective blue speed as well thereby removing cyan dye from yellow.

Does that help?

PE

 

[Richard Harris]

Yep, think that is clearing in my head. Might read it again though. Thanks PE.