The future of colour analog photography is....

sperera · Mar 21, 2010

I'm not a scientist, im a photographer....I cant talk about chemistry and the nuances and variables but I can talk about what I see and what I feel when i see something.....so I've reached a conclusion....

....the future of colour analog photography is to bring out film designed specifically for scanning. In my opinion NO colour negative film is as easy to scan as a transparency.

Labs all over the world are dropping E-6 processing yet still doing C-41....pro users and pro labs go hand in hand and pro users and pro labs is what keeps Kodak and all the rest of them making films....biggest client being Hollywood.

....Kodak, Fuji etc just make the damn things easier to scan and you will get pro users and labs getting into it all big time again!!!!!!!!!!

I'm putting my money where my mouth is....I've invested in colour negative film, my fridge is now full of Kodak Portra 160NC (my fave as some of you know) and I bought a license for ColorPerfect brought to us by the great David Dunthorn....cos you have to scan film in order to get it published and to work professionally.....optical prints are great but you dont give magazines an optical print and get them to scan it, you give them the final images scanned and ready for print!

The hybrid workflow is unavoidable in the pro photographer's world....as much as I love APUG I cant say this without getting flamed there I feel.....

Regardless, these companies are not stupid and what Im saying is hardly an epiphany so I'd like to bring out the placards and stand outside Rochester HQ demanding Kodak etc to somehow make colour negative easier to scan!!!!! hehe hehehee

donbga · Mar 21, 2010

sperera said:
I'm not a scientist, im a photographer....I cant talk about chemistry and the nuances and variables but I can talk about what I see and what I feel when i see something.....so I've reached a conclusion....

....the future of colour analog photography is to bring out film designed specifically for scanning. In my opinion NO colour negative film is as easy to scan as a transparency.

Labs all over the world are dropping E-6 processing yet still doing C-41....pro users and pro labs go hand in hand and pro users and pro labs is what keeps Kodak and all the rest of them making films....biggest client being Hollywood.

....Kodak, Fuji etc just make the damn things easier to scan and you will get pro users and labs getting into it all big time again!!!!!!!!!!

I'm putting my money where my mouth is....I've invested in colour negative film, my fridge is now full of Kodak Portra 160NC (my fave as some of you know) and I bought a license for ColorPerfect brought to us by the great David Dunthorn....cos you have to scan film in order to get it published and to work professionally.....optical prints are great but you dont give magazines an optical print and get them to scan it, you give them the final images scanned and ready for print!

The hybrid workflow is unavoidable in the pro photographer's world....as much as I love APUG I cant say this without getting flamed there I feel.....

Regardless, these companies are not stupid and what Im saying is hardly an epiphany so I'd like to bring out the placards and stand outside Rochester HQ demanding Kodak etc to somehow make colour negative easier to scan!!!!! hehe hehehee

We really need a color negative film without the mask - a clear film base. Rollei was marketing that a one time but stopped.

Apparently it was grainy and low contrast - two qualities most photographers don't want in color films, however something I was interested in. I ordered some from Freestyle last year and they canceled the order since Rollei withdrew the product.

Don

Bruce Watson · Mar 21, 2010

Don Bryant said:
We really need a color negative film without the mask - a clear film base.

No, we don't. That mask is there for color correction. It balances the CMY layers. Because of the mask, color negative film is more color accurate than tranny film. It's especially good at retaining the relationships between colors. That mask is one of the reasons that color negative film is more tolerant of mixed lighting than tranny film. I don't remember exactly how it works; it's been discussed in depth over on APUG with input from a certain Kodak engineer. If you want details, search APUG for them.

All I'm sayin' is: The mask is our friend. Long live the mask.

donbga · Mar 21, 2010

Bruce Watson said:
No, we don't. That mask is there for color correction. It balances the CMY layers. Because of the mask, color negative film is more color accurate than tranny film. It's especially good at retaining the relationships between colors. That mask is one of the reasons that color negative film is more tolerant of mixed lighting than tranny film. I don't remember exactly how it works; it's been discussed in depth over on APUG with input from a certain Kodak engineer. If you want details, search APUG for them.

All I'm sayin' is: The mask is our friend. Long live the mask.

Then have a read about this my friend:

http://www.maco-photo.de/files/images/ROLLEI_DigibaseCN200_GB.pdf

Bob Carnie · Mar 21, 2010

Is this not a monochrome BW film that goes through C41 just like xp2.
without the orange film base?

Don Bryant said:
Then have a read about this my friend:

http://www.maco-photo.de/files/images/ROLLEI_DigibaseCN200_GB.pdf

donbga · Mar 21, 2010

bob carnie said:
Is this not a monochrome BW film that goes through C41 just like xp2.
without the orange film base?

Sorry wrong link Bob. Let me see if I can find the color one.

Don

donbga · Mar 21, 2010

Don Bryant said:
Sorry wrong link Bob. Let me see if I can find the color one.

Don

Okay right now I can't find the PDF link but here is a link to a Flikr group that discusses the film. As I mentioned this film wasn't great but not having a mask made it easier to scan.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/ishootfilm/discuss/72157609875406984/?search=xpro

Here is another link that discusses the film but does require translation to English:

http://medienfrech.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/rollei-digibase-cn200-pro/

Don

pschwart · Mar 21, 2010

sperera said:
....the future of colour analog photography is to bring out film designed specifically for scanning. In my opinion NO colour negative film is as easy to scan as a transparency.

or how about better scanning software? Software can change a lot quicker than film production, and I'm not convinced we should consider this a film defect, anyway ...

pellicle · Mar 21, 2010

as I understand it the mask is designed specifically to make things better. This was explained to me in the following way:

If you were to look at the curve of a single layer cyan, you would see that it has green and blue density in addition to its primary red density. These are impurities.

By adding a variable green and blue mask to the cyan dye (the mask), the unwanted signal is turned into a constant value which is ignored during the printing process.

You cancel the negative blue and green with positive and identical blue and green curves and get a constant that is at the dmin of those curves.

Thus, the actual dmin must be orange as there is a red mask (blue + green correction) in the cyan layer and a yellow mask (blue correction) in the magenta layer.

I understood that the Agfa film without the mask was not actually good at scanning.

I personally feel that the main problem with the majority of non-professional scanners is they lack sufficient strength of signal in the blue channel. Of course if you're discussing this at this level you're already so far above the market norm that you represent perhaps 0.01% of the buying public likely to be making decisions at the shops.

The more I look around my friends and family the more they're further down the digital path at capture, not only knowing less and less about film capture but knowing less and less about every facet of the process.

To address pschwart's point: I have friends in the computer routing and machining area and they report that over the last 20 years that software and hardware are getting more complex and more bug riddled. While his latest $50,000 CNC machine does more elaborate things his 30 year old "driven only by DOS" machine does things faster and more reliably.

sadly big companies do not make profits by selling stuff which just does the job year in year out. They make money by selling you another machine next year. This has been (in my view) a significant part of the drive behind digital.

sperera · Mar 21, 2010

i don't know or can comment on the science but yes, I think colour negative has more latitude and better colour than trannies but it's a black art to scan.....I'm getting better at it but for example....scanned a roll of Fuji Pro 400H as opposed to what I consider my col neg. film Portra 160NC....all i can say is I'm not shooting another roll of the 400H cos it scanned terribly on my system....Im sticking to the Portra which seems to scan better.....

now isn't this a crime....dismissing a film cos i cant get iot to scan well....

also, wet scanning (Kami scan mount fluid) is superb...no newton rings, no dust etc, beautiful quality scanning.....but i just cant get the technique right yet without making a hell of a mess and binning the damn thing not to mention messing up the negative.....

pellicle · Mar 22, 2010

sperera said:
now isn't this a crime....dismissing a film cos i cant get iot to scan well....

this seems to be a symptom of exposure to irrational arseholes who jump down one's throat for saying something. It seems to not be getting less prevalent than the days of rec.photo on usenet.

not sure if it helps but try my negative scan method

http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2009/10/quick-negative-scan-tutorial.html

the information given there is enough to start you in the right direction perhaps from this page and its links at the bottom there is more

http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2010/02/black-and-white-neg-scanning.html

keep in mind the nature of film density as you scan and as you see results and this will help you to see and understand more over time

also, apply curves rather than clipping type adjustments with levels ... well after you've cleaned up where there isn't any signal within the preset range of desktop scanners

donbga · Mar 22, 2010

bob carnie said:
Is this not a monochrome BW film that goes through C41 just like xp2.
without the orange film base?

After further research I've discovered the document is erroneous, that is it states that the film is monochromatic in the PDF, this is incorrect.

Never the less as I implied earlier in the thread, this film isn't state of the art, which for one of my projects is what I wanted. I merely used it as an example of a CN film without color mask.

I can see a future where the only color film available will be color negative and there maybe films versions optimized for scanning without a color mask.

The latest offerings from Kodak scan quite easily once the scanner has been biased for the mask color.

Unfortunately seems like the era of the dedicated desktop scanner is passing by now. Reported this week on the Large Format Forum, Nikon is out of the market. No wonder Nikon 5000s are selling for thousands.

Don

Bob Carnie · Mar 22, 2010

I don't seem to have any problem scanning colour negative film.
Not sure where all the problems come from, basically a little bit of tweaking in the colour channels with no sharpening at time of scan.
I use a digital colour meter**mac applications** set to LAB and when I am preview scanning will look at the areas of the image that need to be somewhat neutral and bring them close .
Afterwards nuetralizing in PS is a breeze.
FWIW
no sharpening, full info on the histogram so the image looks flat with no lost detail at either end, and a basic colour balance.
then hit scan at the desired ppi.

Bob Carnie · Mar 22, 2010

Don I kept getting fluxed about the usage of monochrome when describing the film.
I personally never used the film and have no useful advice with it. Maybe something to look into .

Don Bryant said:
After further research I've discovered the document is erroneous, that is it states that the film is monochromatic in the PDF, this is incorrect.

Never the less as I implied earlier in the thread, this film isn't state of the art, which for one of my projects is what I wanted. I merely used it as an example of a CN film without color mask.

I can see a future where the only color film available will be color negative and there maybe films versions optimized for scanning without a color mask.

The latest offerings from Kodak scan quite easily once the scanner has been biased for the mask color.

Unfortunately seems like the era of the dedicated desktop scanner is passing by now. Reported this week on the Large Format Forum, Nikon is out of the market. No wonder Nikon 5000s are selling for thousands.

Don

donbga · Mar 22, 2010

bob carnie said:
Don I kept getting fluxed about the usage of monochrome when describing the film.
I personally never used the film and have no useful advice with it. Maybe something to look into .

I don't understand your post Bob.

Don

Bob Carnie · Mar 22, 2010

I was confused reading monochrome in the descriptions of the film.

Don Bryant said:
I don't understand your post Bob.

Don

bob100684 · Mar 23, 2010

I used one or two rolls of this stuff. Not impressed....at all. VERY grainy.

donbga · Mar 23, 2010

bob100684 said:
I used one or two rolls of this stuff. Not impressed....at all. VERY grainy.

That's what I was looking for, a retro color film similar to the old GAF 500.

Don

SilverGlow · Apr 27, 2010

Why do some people think that the mask in color film negatives is a problem? It never poses a problem for my scanning workflow...I use a Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED. I'm of the opinion that that mask is a good thing and the absence of it could spell problems for the scan-set.

wartree · Apr 28, 2010

what we need is a simple developing film, totally different chemicals, if color film was made so that anyone would just develope it in a almost way fool proof way, film would came back.

2F/2F · Apr 28, 2010

Chalk me up as someone who has no trouble scanning color negs...not colorwise, anyhow. The mask is there for a very important reason, and scanners know this.

SilverGlow · Apr 29, 2010

wartree said:
what we need is a simple developing film, totally different chemicals, if color film was made so that anyone would just develope it in a almost way fool proof way, film would came back.

It is kind of already that way (easy)....Just bring your color film rolls to Walmart and they'll develop them (without prints) for $1.76...you'd spend more in chemicals and hassle doing it yourself...

sperera · May 8, 2010

I agree with the last two posters.....no point in doing it yourself if you have areliable lab still doing it cheaply.....

SilverGlow said:
It is kind of already that way (easy)....Just bring your color film rolls to Walmart and they'll develop them (without prints) for $1.76...you'd spend more in chemicals and hassle doing it yourself...

nolanr66 · Jul 5, 2010

I guess my plan is to shoot Kodak VC/NC 160 and T-max. I am going to send my film to Picture Preview in Beaverton where they will give me a high rez scan and post the images in my online account and mail back the negs (modest price). I am very happy with that. I was using CostCo but our local CostCo quit on film. It helped propel me to find this new place which I like better anyway. I am glad to be away from the CD thing and I appreciate the much better scans that Picture Preview will provide. I am also trying out the Fuji mailers with Elitechrome and will scan myself. I have a V500 which is a poor scanner so I doubt the Fuji mailer thing will work out. Not sure I want to buy another scanner but I am considering the Plustek 7600i or V700. The Kodak 160VC does scan pretty good on my scanner in comparison with other films.

Alan Klein · Dec 31, 2010

I've been bouncing around this site trying to learn things; just recently joined. They say ignorance is bliss. I didn't realize I was suppose to have a problem with negative masks. I scanned using my Epson V600 flat bed and just used in Elements in PP Levels mainly and a few other adjustments to bring the colors back. I set the scanner on negative for negative and positive for positive film using the Epson scanner program with only ICE, 2400 and 24 bit.. No other scan settings. What's this thing with the mask? I scanned old negatives: Fuji SHG 100, Agfa Optima , Ektar 25, as well as a lot of transparencies (Velvia 50) - you can see on my gallery below. I didn't have a problem. I'm getting ready to start shooting film again with Portra 160vc and 160nc.. Is there something I should be expecting when I get to scan these negatives? Thanks and Happy New Year everyone. Alan.

The future of colour analog photography is....

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