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

BrianShaw said:

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

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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.

BrianShaw said:

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.

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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.

dcy said:

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

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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:


Are their sources that disagree?

dcy said:

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.

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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.

DREW WILEY said:

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.

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Ektar 25 in 120 format scanned with Epson V600.

DREW WILEY said:

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

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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.

That is no doubt true in a general sense, Koraks. But I was speaking in reference to specific tests involving a high quality Creo scanner and trained operator. The same "economy" level of scanning involving 35mm slides produced far less satisfactory color repro than the same entry-level scans involving larger 120 film. If that's the case with a high quality professional Creo setup, how much more must it apply to amateur scans. Those who rely on better equipped labs typically have a choice in the quality of scan, based on what they are willing to pay.

Local labs here will give you c41 processing, and if you wish, both a contact sheet and the scan itself. I print darkroom style, so don't typically need scanning. But there have been commercial applications where I did.

And when it comes to Ektar, the steepness of the dye curves seems to exaggerate the sampling size issue.
I'm not going to try to sleuth that in a technical sense; it's just a practical observation. And on these forums, comparing this to that film always seems to get muddied up by less than ideal scanning variables.

DREW WILEY said:

specific tests involving a high quality Creo scanner and trained operator

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OK, that wasn't clear as it wasn't specified.

DREW WILEY said:

The same "economy" level of scanning involving 35mm slides produced far less satisfactory color repro than the same entry-level scans involving larger 120 film. If that's the case with a high quality professional Creo setup, how much more must it apply to amateur scans.

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Not necessarily; it depends on how the materials are scanned. In practice, there's plenty of ways this can (and will) be different across film formats, and ways in which this can be done with more than satisfactory results also for 35mm film. Sure, bigger is better. But that doesn't mean that there's an inherent problem with 35mm. There is, for my photography, but it's not so much in color rendition. And it's there whether I scan or optically print my film (with scanning followed by inkjet output yielding marginally better results).

DREW WILEY said:

the sampling size issue

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Can you define the term 'sampling size' as you're using it in your posts here?

koraks said:

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.

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I find contrast particularly challenging. Here's an example from a roll I was working on this week. Notice how the tone curve has a sharp spike, where apparently most of the image is in a very narrow range of tones. This happens often, and it's not easy to deal with.




EDIT: The crooked horizon was bothering me:

dcy said:

Notice how the tone curve has a sharp spike

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Keep in mind that the histogram is really just a pareto. The sharp peak is explained simply by having a fairly large area of flat, bright sky. There's not a whole lot you could do about that except point your camera at something else when making the photo. I wouldn't call it a contrast problem, but an issue of unfortunate compositional choices.

koraks said:

Keep in mind that the histogram is really just a pareto. The sharp peak is explained simply by having a fairly large area of flat, bright sky. There's not a whole lot you could do about that except point your camera at something else when making the photo. I wouldn't call it a contrast problem, but an issue of unfortunate compositional choices.

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No. The spike is on the dark side of the tonal range. It's not the sky. It's the trees, the planters, the axel, and all the shadowed areas --- i.e. it's the subject.

Furthermore, had the same data and the same histogram been stretched to use all of the available horizontal space on the user interface, the process would have been a lot easier. This can be seen as either a limitation of the software UI (or equivalent, my ability to use it) in failing to use all of the available space, or a limitation of the film or the digitization process that fails to make the darkest parts of the image truly black, and the lightest parts truly white.

Here's the image again without the tone curve I added. What the histogram is saying is "this image is a giant muddy blob of dark gray".

To be clear, I am not asking for help. I understand the sorts things that need to improve, and this should get better with practice. I could improve my scanning to get more dynamic range in the digital image, and I could find better ways to use the software UI. I am simply giving a relevant supporting example of how someone might struggle with contrast --- I have an image with limited dynamic range and I need to adjust the black point, the white point, and the transition between them to make a passable image.

The spike on the lower part of the hostogram does imply that "data" was chopped-off. At exposure time (film was underexposed), scanning still had a healthy headroom before clipping would become a problem.

aconbere said:

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.

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As a reference point, I have a mirrorless camera and I never shoot it in fully manual mode. I do not enjoy it. I shoot it in aperture priority mode, where one dial sets the aperture and another adjusts exposure relative to the camera's suggested exposure. Sometimes I switch to shutter priority. Either way, exposure compensation is easy because I have an LCD screen with a preview of the image and a truckload of info that helps me avoid clipped highlights and shadows.

aconbere said:

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.

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I'm curious to know what camera you have in mind for less than $100.

brbo said:

The spike on the lower part of the hostogram does imply that "data" was chopped-off. At exposure time (film was underexposed), scanning still had a healthy headroom before clipping would become a problem.

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!!!!!!

That's it! Looking back, it seems obvious, but I really didn't make that connection. I looked through the other shots in this roll. Time after time, almost every shot, including the ones with a better tonal range that were easier to edit, exhibit a similar sudden "chop" at the dark edge of the histogram.

This film was Rollei Retro 80S, which I believe I shot at EI 80 --- I should've kept a record. Overall, I was fairly disappointed with it. Now I know, if I ever shoot it again, I need to give it more light.

dcy said:

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.

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I have a number of cameras, way too many, including my point and shoots which carry for just that. I use the weather resistant Pentax and Konicas when shooting in a dust storm or rain, mostly when traveling with my wife. Other times I use a small compact SLR like a Minolta 5 or Nikon N60 which have both program and manual modes, matrix metering. Although I don't have one a Canon Rebel 2000 is another option. What I dont like about the N60 is that is does not allow for override of the DX ISO so I have to revert to exposure compensation. All three are cheap I bought my Minolta 5 for less than $20 on Shop Goodwill.com, cost more to ship, still inexpensive. The Minolta 5 will work with all Minolta AF A mount lens, 5 pin, 8 pin, SMA and newer Sony A mount full frame lens. I have Minolta pro bodies and lens which I use when I shoot wildlife or need addtioanl features. Ebay has similar prices on these bodies. Buy 2, one for a speare.

dcy said:

!!!!!!

That's it! Looking back, it seems obvious, but I really didn't make that connection. I looked through the other shots in this roll. Time after time, almost every shot, including the ones with a better tonal range that were easier to edit, exhibit a similar sudden "chop" at the dark edge of the histogram.

This film was Rollei Retro 80S, which I believe I shot at EI 80 --- I should've kept a record. Overall, I was fairly disappointed with it. Now I know, if I ever shoot it again, I need to give it more light.

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To me, it looks more like you need to adjust your white point on the scanned image. Move the point at the top right of the curve to the left along the top axis. It will spread out that sharp peak that bothers you. At some point (in line with the first sign of highlight tones in the histogram) you will start to lose highlight detail, so stop there.

dcy said:

This film was Rollei Retro 80S, which I believe I shot at EI 80 --- I should've kept a record. Overall, I was fairly disappointed with it. Now I know, if I ever shoot it again, I need to give it more light.

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ISO 80 is VERY optimistic for Rollei Retro 80S.

dcy said:

The spike is on the dark side of the tonal range.

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Sorry, I've been working with manual inversions for too long.
Anyway, you figured out already that you're just looking at a bunch of compresses shadows. The same metering issue you ran into with your color negative.

dcy said:

Time after time, almost every shot, including the ones with a better tonal range that were easier to edit, exhibit a similar sudden "chop" at the dark edge of the histogram.

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The extent to which the histogram bunches up against either side depends on a couple of factors, mostly the nature of the composition, exposure when recording the image and exposure during digitization. You can take a perfectly fine negative and digitize it in such a way that the entire image gets crammed up to either side or the histogram. Which is to say you need yo get both exposures right to get optimal image data to work with. It's not awfully difficult; it just takes a little practice. For the first exposure it helps to have a decent light meter and to understand well how it responds to any given situation.

Practice, practice.

dcy said:

I am embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of a "flash meter" before. I found a YT video that explains what they do.



I found this article explaining the difference between incident vs reflective light meters. It explains a bit about why incident is better.

The flash meter @mshchem found on eBay is just $25. There are others on Amazon at a similar price. I would be happy to grab one and learn to use it. The problem I have is that my camera doesn't have traditional manual controls. Instead of aperture + shutter, I have to guess what the camera's light meter is thinking and use one dial to adjust exposure, and another to toggle between slow shutter or wide aperture.

In a previous thread you explained to me how to adjust exposure when photographing something like white snow vs a scene that is very black.

Can you think of a way that I could use either a flash meter or a spot meter to better guess how to adjust exposures with the camera controls that I have?

Perhaps I can take two measurements: one in a relatively well lit part of the scene and one on the subject. The difference between the two exposures would give me a rough measure of how much I might need to compensate.

What should I be looking for in an incident light meter?

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Last question first - that it works and is undamaged. That plus decent low level performance, because some of the iconic examples like the Norwood Director which morphed into the Sekonic Studio series are/were great to use, but as they use selenium cells and don't have the ability to deal with really low light.
Most hand held meters have either a removable accessory dome or an integrating dome that slides into and out of place. I favour the latter.
My little Gossen Digiflash is a very capable example, which also adds flash meter capability.
Can you remind me whether your Pentax 17 camera reports the shutter speed and aperture settings that the auto exposure sets? You need that if you want to combine the use of the meter in the camera with a separate meter and the exposure compensation function.
Also, does the camera include an exposure lock function? If so, when you are taking photos inside, go close so your primary subject fills the frame, take a meter reading, lock the exposure, apply any compensation necessary and then without releasing the exposure lock move back before actually taking the photo.
That approach being sometimes referred to as the "footstep" version of a spot meter!
I'm not sure how useful a flash meter will be for you without having manual exposure available to you.

MattKing said:

Can you remind me whether your Pentax 17 camera reports the shutter speed and aperture settings that the auto exposure sets?

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It does not. The biggest problem with the camera is not the controls that it has, but that you're flying blind because the camera doesn't report what it's doing.

MattKing said:

Also, does the camera include an exposure lock function?

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Unfortunately, it does not have that either.

MattKing said:

I'm not sure how useful a flash meter will be for you without having manual exposure available to you.

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That's what I feared. If / when I get a new camera, it won't be because of the half-frame format or the controls. It will be because the camera doesn't tell me what it's planning to do.

I just thought of a slightly absurd way to coax information out of the camera: I can fiddle with the knobs until the camera gives me a insufficient-exposure warning, and use the fact that I know the camera's slowest shutter is 4s and widest aperture is F/3.5. For example, here in my office, with the ISO dial set to 200 and exposure compensation set to +2 stops, I get a warning. But with exposure comp set to +1 2/3 stops, I do not get a warning. It is insane that I'd have to do something like that, but... there it is.

Or I could get two light meters --- one incident, one reflective --- and hope the reflective one mimics the camera.

I would definitely not put myself through this much hassle for each of the 72 shots in each roll. But I could imagine myself doing it for indoor shots where I notice that the lighting is tricky. --- Then again, I might say to myself "sod it, I'll just take 3 shots at different exposures".

EDIT: The light meter app on my phone, pointed in the same direction, reads EV = 7.7, aperture = F/3.5, ISO = 50, shutter = 1/8. That doesn't jibe with my reasoning about the camera's exposure warning light.

Without manual control an incident meter isn’t very useful. Get a general-coverage reflected meter. That’s what your camera is doing and the major difference might be slightly different metering pattern. Many have a capability for incidence readings too so if it does you’ll be postured for your future manual camera. And, yes, I predict one in your future.

dcy said:

Or I could get two light meters --- one incident, one reflective --- and hope the reflective one mimics the camera.

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Most of the meters that I have ever used offer both. In the case of a couple of them, they also offer a flash metering capability.
The only exception being the ones designed to only give spot readings.
I really don't recommend using a spot meter unless and until you are comfortable using a more general purpose meter.
Sort of: "become competent with the Celestron on your back porch before taking the controls of the Hubble", if that makes sense.
And yes, I know that is a reference to astronomers, but it may be close.

Not to change to conversation too much but does anyone know where gold 200 would fall on this chart, particularly in graininess. I’m assuming it would fall between portra 400 and 800?

I wish Kodak had added gold to this chart and I believe it’s a great film, especially in 120. But I realize the chart is supposed to be Kodak’s “professional” films.

According to the data sheet information, Gold is ever so slightly less grainy than Portra 800

MattKing said:

Most of the meters that I have ever used offer both. In the case of a couple of them, they also offer a flash metering capability.
The only exception being the ones designed to only give spot readings.

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What do you think of these:

• Gossen Luna Six -- US $24 + $10 shipping
• Gossen Luna Pro -- US $20 + $8 shipping

I found this article that recommends the Luna Pro as a budget option that can do both incident and reflected light.

Note 1: The first link is for a different model. I include it because it has a manual, cause I haven't the faintest clue how I'd use this thing to switch between incident and reflected light. Then again, it's a different model form what the article recommends, so maybe it doesn't have the same features.

Note 2: The Luna Pro is widely available. There are many listings with similar in the $30 - $50 range that all claim to have tested the meter (link, link, link, link, link).

Luna-six/Luna-pro are fantastic meters and affordable too. The only caveat is that you’ll need a MR-9 battery adapter since it uses obsolete battery. Gossen battery adapter is available at B&H last time I looked. The white dome gets slide from the side to the center, over the sensor, to change to incident mode. Then slid to either side for reflective mode.

For a bit more money and a more modern sensor and current battery, you could look at Luna pro SBC. A bit bigger but a faster meter to use.

Manuals and how-to-use guidance is online, or in those books…