Phoenix II pictures

Here are some from my first roll of Phoenix II. These were scanned by my local lab, when I pick up the negatives I'll scan them again myself because I think there are still scanning issues and that I can do a better job.

Also bear in mind these were shot on a 1930s Zeiss-Ikon 6x6 folder which was "new to me" and hitherto untested since it was last used over 40 years ago.

Strong blues and greens, weak reds seems to be pretty par for the course here. I think that kind of color palette can work for some photos. To my eye though those scans could all benefit from a bit of a white balance adjustment in a warmer direction, and probably adjusting away from magenta and towards green a bit as well.

BHuij said:

Strong blues and greens, weak reds seems to be pretty par for the course here. I think that kind of color palette can work for some photos. To my eye though those scans could all benefit from a bit of a white balance adjustment in a warmer direction, and probably adjusting away from magenta and towards green a bit as well.

Click to expand...

yes, and what i find interesting the reds stay quite good, much better than mine...

Agulliver said:

Here are some from my first roll of Phoenix II. These were scanned by my local lab, when I pick up the negatives I'll scan them again myself because I think there are still scanning issues and that I can do a better job.

Also bear in mind these were shot on a 1930s Zeiss-Ikon 6x6 folder which was "new to me" and hitherto untested since it was last used over 40 years ago.

Click to expand...

I think these look amazing. I'm pretty impressed with what Harman has achieved. I am sure I have a less discerning eye than others here, but for what it's worth, this is something I would be willing to shoot as a regular everyday color film.

Given the suppressed reds, I wonder if it would be helpful to use some strong warming filtration and a bit more exposure when exposing it, to help reduce the blue and green response.
It wouldn't necessarily give better colour, but it might make it easier to scan or print it optically.

I'm in full agreement that there's too much in the way of magenta in those scans. I know my local lab specifically has issues with Phoenix I

When I am back from another little trip (not shooting Phoenix this time) I'll get the negatives and have a go at scanning them myself. But overall, especially as I shot this on a 1930s camera without the benefit of modern lenses and coatings, I'm quite happy with the improvements Harman have made.

Okay, just got my first roll scanned, and I must say I'm impressed.

I shot this at EI 125 and developed in DIY ECN-2 chemistry. Usually I do the standard 3 minutes in developer for Vision3 films, and 5 minutes for C-41 films to try and recover some contrast lost by using CD-3 instead of CD-4. Since Phoenix I was incredibly contrasty and Phoenix II is still quite contrasty from everything I've heard, I decided to give it 4 minutes instead of the normal 5 I would give to other C-41 films. So basically... I pulled the film roughly 2/3 of a stop compared to box speed exposure and standard development.

Once dry, I scanned as raw images at 4000 DPI with my CoolScan 4000, using VueScan. No corrections, presets, or processing at all other than a bit of IR dust removal on the part of VueScan. I'll link DNGs if anyone has a better way to convert from raw scans to positive images. I'm what you might consider "barely competent" at that task.

Once I had my DNGs, I followed my normal workflow in Lightroom with Negative Lab Pro. There are a couple of steps to overwrite metadata, and then I just converted with NLP's absolute default settings for color negative film. I have done no manual color balancing, sharpening, or exposure adjustments on these positives (though some could use it).

Included are three frames I thought were interesting. 2 of them demonstrate that I got weirdly good reds. Perhaps NLP's black box did something to the scans to improve the reds automatically. The one without any red shows that the dynamic range of the film is better than I anticipated. I got pretty close to full shadow detail on the leaf, and still had texture in the much brighter highlight area on the same leaf.

The film isn't hugely sharp (compared to Delta 100 in Mytol or something), and it's a fair bit grainier than I'd expect from a more mature 200 speed film (especially pulled). But it's not half bad. I think I'm going to shoot some 6x6 of this film next. I rather like it.

Link to RAW scans in case anyone wants to try a better conversion: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1axIGgQcZCGA3SR7n7FB1X5edRH-5CSFs?usp=sharing

In 6x6 the grain really isn't an issue. I'd think that 6x4.5 would be great too. Phoenix II is definitely a big improvement in most aspects over Phoenix I. It's still not quite an everyday, every situation film such as Ultramax or even Color Plus but Harman have made another sizeable stride.