Last week or so, I got my Aerocolor in and yesterday I shot a few sheets to see what it does. I've not wet printed them yet; I hope to do this maybe next week or so. I did chuck the negs on the scanner (in their printfile thingy sleeve) for a sneak preview. Here's what it looks like:
Basically, it's just color negative, only unmasked. The base isn't entirely clear, but slightly magenta-yellow; I'd say a ratio of 5:1 magenta:yellow or so. In the scan above it looks more yellow, but in reality it's more magenta for sure (I need to get an E6 calibration target....) Nothing weird going on otherwise; gamma looks perfectly normal for a C41 film, there's no massive halation either; there's a tiny bit of light piping in the top left shot in the bottom right corner, but that's what you'd expect on any kind of regular camera film. I also overexposed that frame because I wanted to be shure not to clip off anything in the shadows on that one and I wasn't entirely sure if my light meter wasn't being fooled by some reflections or highlights (turns out it wasn't and I should just trust it a little better, hah!)
Inverted and with a very crude color balance applied, this is what I get:
But take such conversions with a hefty grain of salt; they say virtually nothing except that there's color in the images. How you twist & turn the curves digitally is entirely up to the photographer/editor - which is great, of course, but it also means we cannot say much about "what the film does" based on an image like the one above.
In post processing I didn't notice anything particularly weird in terms of crossover - but scans are deceptive. Still, my experience with crossed over films is that I generally see at least a bit of that when color balancing them using the curves tool, and this time the RGB curves ended up pretty parallel. It does depend a bit on where you place the start and end points (deceptive!), but overall it seems well-behaved - certainly for scanning.
At a more theoretical level, I would like to point out that Aerocolor IV isn't as well-behaved as e.g. Portra (which costs >twice as much in sheet format); see the overlayed H/D curves here (Aerocolor = cyan, Portra 160 = magenta):
Three things stand out:
1: The gamma/contrast of the Aerocolor is way higher. However, this is when it's developed for 'medium contrast', which Kodak specifies as 4m15s instead of 3m15s in C41. I processed my film as normal C41 film, so 3m15s. The datasheet implies that regular C41 processing would yield a gamma of around 0.65, which is close to where you'd find most color negative films (0.57-0.63). It's slightly punchy, so I expect to see that when wet printing it.
2: The absolute distance between the curves is different. No sh**, Sherlock...it's a maskless film. So left of the toe, we can see the orange mask of Portra in a very high blue density, a little less green and especially a lot less red density (i.e. it's reddish orange, which meshes with reality if you've seen P160 negatives). The Aerocolor however has very little base color and what little it has is predominantly red, with much less green and blue light coming through if you hold it against the light. This aligns with what I explained above and my visual perception, but if you look critically you can see that my negative scan looks more yellow in the base, which shows how scanners can be deceptive even when set as neutral as possible.
3: The Aerocolor crosses over much more so than Portra. The crossover is between all channels, with red getting behind the most. This means that if you invert linearly, you'll end up with cyan-magenta (more accurately, cyan-blue) highlights and brownish shadows. I wonder how that pans out because it's pretty much the opposite of what 'feels' right. Maybe it's not all that visible in color printing (the paper curve does something, too, although sadly
it tends to cross in the same direction). Of course the scans don't show this because this kind of crossover is totally lost in the black-box behavior of the scanner and willy-nilly adjustments that are necessary to turn a scanned negative into a positive image. The proof of the pudding, for me, will be in the printing.
I metered the above at 125, but the shutter on this lens is probably around 1/2 to 2/3 of a stop slow on the speeds I used. Still, the EI125 exposure seems liberal; for instance, the tree trunk in the bottom left I would have expected to drop off into the abyss of featureless shadows, but it ended up having plenty of printable detail. I'm not going to say anything like "oh this must really be a 200 film at least", since I didn't do any sensitometry. But so far at least it seems that 125 gives perfectly usable results, at least for me, even though the datasheet implies that this speed is for development at max contrast (which is 5m15s) and you'd expect a speed of something like 80 or maybe 100 or so when giving less development. Anyway, I'll happily continue shooting it at 125 until I bump my head.
Let's see how it prints, but so far it's promising.
