Suggest a color film that's one step better than Kodak Gold or ColorPlus?

[dcy]

Addressing this potential issue might make many of your current problems vanish. Seriously consider getting a camera that gives you control.

I will seriously consider that. I'm not eager to spend a lot of money so soon after spending $500 on a brand new camera that I honestly like very much. I love many things about my camera (its size, how it feels in the hand, etc), and I like the controls. But I don't love the fact that I've no idea what the camera is planning to do and that makes it harder to compensate. If the camera just had a little screen that said "this is the exposure I'm planning to use", that'd be perfect.

And read a good book on exposure determination/control. Learning piecemeal on forum threads can be challenging because of the diversity of recommendation/options available.

I do have several books already and I am reading them. Some of them I bought because they were recommended in this forum. Others were sent to me by a generous member of this forum.

 

[BrianShaw]

• Pro Image 100 --- $10 / roll --- Larger grain (same as K. Gold), but with much better dynamic range.

Going back to post 1... I'm in the process of trying ProImage 100 (but can't seem to finish the roll fast enough even though I have a motor drive on my F3). I'm trying it based on lower cost and alleged finer grain than Kodak Gold. For example:

Proimage 100 Film Reviews & Photos - The Darkroom Photo Lab

If Ektar and Portra had a baby it’d be Kodak Pro Image 100. This film has sharp grain like Ektar 100, but its colors are closer to Portra 160 colors and tones

thedarkroom.com

Are their sources that disagree?

 

[aconbere]

I will seriously consider that. I'm not eager to spend a lot of money so soon after spending $500 on a brand new camera that I honestly like very much. I love many things about my camera (its size, how it feels in the hand, etc), and I like the controls. But I don't love the fact that I've no idea what the camera is planning to do and that makes it harder to compensate. If the camera just had a little screen that said "this is the exposure I'm planning to use", that'd be perfect.

Having followed your journey on the forum I do think you will benefit enormously from a camera with fully manual controls along with a high quality light meter. If for no other reason than you seem to enjoy working out all the details on your own.

But this doesn’t have to cost very much! Certainly an excellent manual camera can be had for less than $100. The light meter might actually be the tricker of the two to find at a decent price, but again this seems like the sort of thing that this forum is well suited to help with.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Sorry, Brian. Gotta disagree on a few particulars.

Overexposing Ektar to boost the shadows is likely to blow out the highlights instead, and risk color shifts or washing out there. Ektar has only about a stop further each direction of latitude than typical slide film. There is a way to selectively improve the shadows by pre-flashing the film instead; but I won't outline it here.

Ektar suffers from cyan contamination of blue, especially at the fringes of exposure latitude. Getting a magenta shift is less common. I once got an interesting blue to magenta gradient shift toward the corners of the field by employing the native fall-off characteristics of a wide angle lens near the summit of Haleakala.
It was deliberate. But on the same Island, the turquoise tropical water came out absolutely stunning due to the cyan imbalance of Ektar; yet the greens and earthtone hues in the foreground were rendered quite
accurately anyway.

Most problems with scanning are due to an insufficient sampling size in relation to 35mm film. Either pay for a higher quality scan or shoot a larger film format.

Ektar 25 in 120 format scanned with Epson V600.

Flickr Search

www.flickr.com

 

[koraks]

Most problems with scanning are due to an insufficient sampling size in relation to 35mm film.

99% of the problems I see people running into and asking help with when scanning color negative film relate to color balancing, and to a lesser degree contrast management. In virtually all instances, it turns out that neither the recording format, nor the scanning/digitization setup is the problem, and the fix is in how to use them properly.