Thin color negatives?

Paul Ozzello · Oct 28, 2021

I have the impression my color negatives are a little thin - especially compared to my black and white negatives. How should they look?

Just to eliminate some variables :
I shoot 2/3 box speed
I use a pentax digital spotmeter to measure the darkest areas and place them between zones 2 and 3.
My 3 light meters all measure within 1/3 stop
My lens shutter speeds are all accurate.
All 2 dozen rolls are roughly the same and processing was done by 2 different labs.

Paul

MattKing · Oct 28, 2021

Those look like excellent colour negatives to me.

Paul Ozzello · Oct 28, 2021

MattKing said:
Those look like excellent colour negatives to me.

How can you tell?

I have some decades old ektar 25 negs that are much denser but maybe that's not a valid comparison?

AnselMortensen · Oct 28, 2021

Those negatives look properly exposed and developed, the density is good.

MattKing · Oct 28, 2021

fatso said:
How can you tell?

I have some decades old ektar 25 negs that are much denser but maybe that's not a valid comparison?

Well, I worked for a time as a colour printer. The negatives that printed well back then looked like that.
And the colour negatives (Portra 160) that I get back from the lab now that print (unfortunately infrequently) or scan well still look like that.
Remember that colour paper and black and white paper are designed with different contrast, so the films for them are designed with different contrast.
Have you tried creating prints yet from them?
I never used Ektar 25 - don't even know that I've seen Ektar 25 negatives in the flesh - but I would be reluctant to base my impressions on the appearance of negatives from that film stock.
A very, very quick bit of post-processing of the screen shot gives me this, which tells me that there is lots of detail to work with there:

MattKing · Oct 28, 2021

By the way, I really like what you have there!

Paul Ozzello · Oct 28, 2021

MattKing said:
By the way, I really like what you have there!

Thanks Matt

Lol - that's the first image I've seen from the series ;-) I haven't printed any but will eventually scan them once I find my scanners power supply..

Lachlan Young · Oct 28, 2021

@fatso those look about right for colour negs. The visual density differences you are seeing vis-a-vis Ektar 25 probably owes much to the replacement of the yellow filter layer with a special dye rather than Carey Lea Silver. If you're using the shadow keying you describe, you can use full box speed & you'll automatically get about +2/3 stop exposure.

Tom Kershaw · Oct 28, 2021

fatso said:
Lol - that's the first image I've seen from the series ;-) I haven't printed any but will eventually scan them once I find my scanners power supply..

Your colour negatives look fine to me, although certainly not over exposed. I've had C-41 frames that I've thought looked slightly thin but have printed or scanned without difficulty. I use a Pentax Digital Spotmeter as well for medium and large format and find it gives good consistency of results.

DREW WILEY · Oct 29, 2021

Depends on the contrast of the specific film involved, as well as the scene. But based on my screen, that does look fairly typical for Portra 400. Portra 160 often looks thinner because it's lower contrast, while Ektar often looks thicker due to its higher saturation and contrast. The intensity of the orange mask also varies somewhat from film to film. What I like to do is place my color negs on the lightbox and view them through an 82B med blue filter, which visually neutralizes some of that orange and allows me to evaluate the actual contrast level and dye densities more easily.

Andrew O'Neill · Oct 29, 2021

They look pretty "normal" to me.

foc · Oct 29, 2021

As has been said, they look good.

A simple and quick rule of thumb is to check the edge markings and see if they are good. (edge markings are factory exposed so if you can read them and they look good then usually the processing is good).

See this sample here.

koraks · Oct 30, 2021

fatso said:
I have the impression my color negatives are a little thin - especially compared to my black and white negatives. How should they look?

AS said by others: they're supposed to look thin! RA4 paper, which C41 film was designed for in the end (or vice versa...depending on how you look at it) is very contrast; think something like grade 4-5 or so. A direct comparison between C41 negatives and B&W negatives can be very misleading due to this.

Bikerider · Oct 30, 2021

The orange mask disguises the actual detail in a colour negative. I printed 2 negatives to 12 x 16 last night and the first negative had fir trees at the base with very little detail visible to the naked eye. When it was washed and dried all the detail was there in the correct tonal range. The second looked dreadfully underexposed with little detail anywhere except in the closest point of the view. Again when it was printed the middle and far distance of the print were all there, it was the mist and atmospheric haze that made the negative just look slightly fogged with no detail

Using a spot-meter for your measurements can be a rod for your back. It is probably much more accurate to use a meter with an incident light cone and point it towards where the main source of light is coming from. Or, alternately measure the reflected light off a 18% grey card or off the back of your hand (White Caucasian skin tone). Failing that grass on a lawn does just as well.

Lachlan Young · Oct 31, 2021

Bikerider said:
Using a spot-meter for your measurements can be a rod for your back. It is probably much more accurate to use a meter with an incident light cone and point it towards where the main source of light is coming from. Or, alternately measure the reflected light off a 18% grey card or off the back of your hand (White Caucasian skin tone). Failing that grass on a lawn does just as well.

A spot meter used correctly for highlight or shadow keying should agree very closely with an incident meter when used correctly for highlight or shadow keying. Grey cards or backs of hands are massively more error prone.

Bikerider · Nov 1, 2021

Lachlan Young said:
A spot meter used correctly for highlight or shadow keying should agree very closely with an incident meter when used correctly for highlight or shadow keying. Grey cards or backs of hands are massively more error prone.

Sorry I cannot agree. The average colour of the back of a Caucasian males hand correlates very closely with the results from a grey card. There seems to be a strongly ingrained wish to take everything to the N'th degree of accuracy, when more time could be spent actually taking pictures and not hand wringing in case they got it wrong. Grey cars used to be the industry standard and the difference between those and the back of a hand is only very rarely more the 1/8th of a stop out. Even the most sophisticated exposure meters can only come as close as that.

Much the same applies with using the insides of a breakfast cereal packet as an emergency grey card. Or if you are really desperate a patch of green grass.

Call it a cavalier attitude, but experience gained over 60 years of photography has taught me that if one thinks about a task in hand too much, the job never gets done. Get out and do it and let the meter take care of the problems of exposure. If you know what you are doing it rarely goes wrong.

pentaxuser · Nov 1, 2021

I winder what fatso has concluded about his negs, now? I must admit that I have seldom seen a greater degree of consensus on any thread as I have on this. It is starting to becoming a bit worrying

pentaxuser

MultiFormat Shooter · Nov 1, 2021

Bikerider said:
...if one thinks about a task in hand too much, the job never gets done. Get out and do it....

That's good advice for life, in general!

BrianShaw · Nov 1, 2021

Bikerider said:
Sorry I cannot agree. The average colour of the back of a Caucasian males hand correlates very closely with the results from a grey card. There seems to be a strongly ingrained wish to take everything to the N'th degree of accuracy, when more time could be spent actually taking pictures and not hand wringing in case they got it wrong. Grey cars (sic) used to be the industry standard and the difference between those and the back of a hand is only very rarely more the 1/8th of a stop out. Even the most sophisticated exposure meters can only come as close as that.

I thought one metered off the PALM of the hand for "gray card minus one stop".

EDIT: I just did a N=1 experiment. Both the back and palm of my Caucasian left hand measure within 1/3 stop of each other using a Gossen LunaPro SBC meter. Both measure approximately one stop more than a Kodak gray card.

Lachlan Young · Nov 1, 2021

Bikerider said:
Sorry I cannot agree. The average colour of the back of a Caucasian males hand correlates very closely with the results from a grey card. There seems to be a strongly ingrained wish to take everything to the N'th degree of accuracy, when more time could be spent actually taking pictures and not hand wringing in case they got it wrong. Grey cars used to be the industry standard and the difference between those and the back of a hand is only very rarely more the 1/8th of a stop out. Even the most sophisticated exposure meters can only come as close as that.

Much the same applies with using the insides of a breakfast cereal packet as an emergency grey card. Or if you are really desperate a patch of green grass.

Call it a cavalier attitude, but experience gained over 60 years of photography has taught me that if one thinks about a task in hand too much, the job never gets done. Get out and do it and let the meter take care of the problems of exposure. If you know what you are doing it rarely goes wrong.

A lot of the time people with some experience inherently compensate for the shortcomings of the makeshift (by today's standards, as opposed to the 1940s/ 50s when good spot meters and incident meters were bleeding edge tech) metering techniques you outline. Fundamentally the problem is that most people would struggle to identify midtones, while the deepest detailed shadow, or brightest detailed highlight they wish to retain are easily identified - and, more to the point, most emulsions are designed to comply with speed rating standards that relate to shadow keying or highlight keying. It doesn't take much effort to discover that too many people (especially those who insist on metering everything, or who spend forever angling a grey card perfectly) are wasting massive amounts of time and energy when one appropriately keyed reading gives them an appropriate exposure and all that a second appropriately keyed reading will tell them is the contrast range (if they need to know it). Even more startlingly, they might discover that shadow values are often astonishingly steady for a large part of the day!

BrianShaw said:
Both measure approximately one stop more than a Kodak gray card.

Which tracks to the Caucasian skin index on the IRE scale.

Paul Ozzello · Nov 1, 2021

pentaxuser said:
I winder what fatso has concluded about his negs, now? I must admit that I have seldom seen a greater degree of consensus on any thread as I have on this. It is starting to becoming a bit worrying

pentaxuser

Thanks to everyone for chiming in!

I'm concluding that they are properly exposed (I think ;-) but is there a way of judging them more analytically and less subjectively ? Say with a densitometer ? What would I measure ?

Lachlan Young · Nov 1, 2021

fatso said:
is there a way of judging them more analytically and less subjectively ? Say with a densitometer ? What would I measure ?

Status M densitometry. Unless you have need to carry out certain process controls, overall it's probably not worth the effort. If you are getting acceptable shadow detail in high end scans or optical prints and the colours aren't going weird from excessive exposure, you're fine.

Paul Ozzello · Nov 1, 2021

Lachlan Young said:
Status M densitometry. Unless you have need to carry out certain process controls, overall it's probably not worth the effort. If you are getting acceptable shadow detail in high end scans or optical prints and the colours aren't going weird from excessive exposure, you're fine.

Is that something I could do with my x-rite 361T ?

halfaman · Nov 2, 2021

Already said. A negative doesn't need to look well but print well, and it can be applied to both B/W and color film.

Lachlan Young · Nov 2, 2021

fatso said:
Is that something I could do with my x-rite 361T ?

Is that the one that does huge Dmax and visual/ UV readings? You'd be able to get overall density readings, but if you are trying to diagnose a process fault and that sort of thing, the 810/811 etc are the ones that do Status A/ Status M etc.

Thin color negatives?

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