Too much yellow on trees...'

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Nikon 2

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Some of my prints show too much yellow on trees that should be green.
Only the trees that have the direct intensive sunlight show the yellow.
Stopping down doesn’t seem to work.
The lab technician said the film I’m using, Kodak Ektar 100, has this problem and shows extensive yellowing in extreme lighting. He suggested using a different film, Kodak Portra or Gold. Can a filter help?
The scans sent don’t show the yellowing as much as the prints...!
 

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I’ll see if the optical printing eliminates the problem with excessive yellowing…!
 

mshchem

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It's late (or early) light, very yellow, lower color temperature. The shade is very cool, higher color temperature. This is where digital voodoo comes in handy
 

mshchem

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I suspect that the lab just doesn't fool around making any corrections. Ektar is the absolute perfect film for scenery. I would try to keep everything in the same lighting conditions. Try taking the scans into a photo editing software and play with the color temperature. Even my old Android phone has some free photo editing app.
 
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It's late (or early) light, very yellow, lower color temperature. The shade is very cool, higher color temperature. This is where digital voodoo comes in handy

Those photos were shot very early in the morning…!
 
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I suspect that the lab just doesn't fool around making any corrections. Ektar is the absolute perfect film for scenery. I would try to keep everything in the same lighting conditions. Try taking the scans into a photo editing software and play with the color temperature. Even my old Android phone has some free photo editing app.

The scans were much better with none of the excess yellowing…!
 

MattKing

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Those photos were shot very early in the morning…!

Which means mixed lighting - blue shadows and yellow highlights. Ektar is both accurate and quite saturated, so the effects of mixed lighting are quite visible.
In other words, you are actually seeing how it actually is.
 

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Those photos were shot very early in the morning…!

Yeah, that's it! You can look at color correction filters when you take the original, but that defeats the reason to get up to get the great lighting. The prints are the computer guessing, not very good guess.
 

MattKing

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The scans were much better with none of the excess yellowing…!

Adjust your filtering to render the part of the image you are most concerned with in a way that is pleasing to you. The other parts of the image - which were illuminated with different light - will appear different as well. If that change is unsatisfactory, you may need to compromise.
 
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Adjust your filtering to render the part of the image you are most concerned with in a way that is pleasing to you. The other parts of the image - which were illuminated with different light - will appear different as well. If that change is unsatisfactory, you may need to compromise.

What type of filtering…?
 

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One more thing is convert it to black and white in photoshop 🙂

One reason Ansel Adams preferred black and white
 
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One more thing is convert it to black and white in photoshop 🙂

One reason Ansel Adams preferred black and white

It’s not that I haven’t thought of shooting black and white, it’s that I love colors much more…!
 

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MattKing

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What type of filtering…?

Sorry, I misunderstood and thought you were doing your own darkroom colour prints.

The filtration is what the colour printer chooses when printing optically from a negative.

Whether or not the negative is printed optically, or scanned and the scans are printed digitally, it is your subject that is creating most of the problem. Warm/yellow light on the highlights and cool/blue light in the shadows. Ektar just happens to make that more obvious than some other films.
 
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Sorry, I misunderstood and thought you were doing your own darkroom colour prints.

The filtration is what the colour printer chooses when printing optically from a negative.

Whether or not the negative is printed optically, or scanned and the scans are printed digitally, it is your subject that is creating most of the problem. Warm/yellow light on the highlights and cool/blue light in the shadows. Ektar just happens to make that more obvious than some other films.

Those prints were from Process One.
My next lab is Blue Moon… and they use the optical method…!
 

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Those prints were from Process One.
My next lab is Blue Moon… and they use the optical method…!

You may have much better luck with a skilled printer, no doubt. Still will be a compromise. Let Blue Moon what you want, that will help them zero in.
 
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You may have much better luck with a skilled printer, no doubt. Still will be a compromise. Let Blue Moon what you want, that will help them zero in.

Good advice, thanks…!
 

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If you put the pictures into Photoshop and press 'Auto Color' to correct the colour balance in a rough and ready test it shows that some of them aren't right anyway, so the lab has exaggerated the colour in the prints. If you can't print them at home send the scanned files which you say are much better to another printer and have some inkjet prints done. Always follow the inkjet labs/printers instructions for type of file and colour space.
 

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The scans sent don’t show the yellowing as much as the prints...!

I'd suggest doing your own prints. You evidently have a good idea what you want your prints to look like, so it makes good sense to take control over that part of the process as well. Whether you use inkjet, send digital files to get silver halide prints back, or darkroom optical enlargement, doesn't matter - in all instances you can control what color rendition you want. Within the capabilities of the process and your own competencies of course. The latter is very flexible, as you can learn (which coincidentally is also fun).

I've simulated a magenta + yellow adjustment on one of those prints:
1688199091311.png

It's of course an approximation, since I'm working with a quick & dirty adjustment of a photo of a print, posted back to you as a digital file...a real print will always look differently.

Note that what the others said is of course very true and won't change, ever: early morning and late afternoon/evening light is warm, and shadows are cool. Exploit it, embrace it or work around it as you desire.

Learn to look like painters do, and forget things you think you know about objects having colors. Trees are NOT green. Rocks are NOT grey. People are NOT pink or brown. Water is NOT blue. As kids, we somehow learn to draw/paint this way, but it's nonsense in the end.

Look at a Van Gogh painting and ask yourself if those colors are real. They can't be, right? They are! He painted exactly what he saw - exaggerated the colors, yes (and some of them have faded/shifted, especially the yellows)! Look at his portraits and note how faces have streaks of green in them, how shadow areas are stark blue (e.g. his Auvers church) or cyan (some of his almond blossoms - spring light!), and how his trees are cacophonies of greens, blues, whites, tans, yellows...It looks unreal, until you start actually carefully looking at the real world and isolating the colors under different lighting conditions. You start to notice that what he did was eerily accurate - just amplified.

Look at a scene as it really is, and not at the objects as you think you recognize them. Your photo above: try not to look at a stream, the rocks in it, the trees in the background. Notice a patch of dark greens on the left, an area of cyan hues in the center, vibrant yellows and oranges to the right. The bottom half consists of pale blues and magentas, with flashes of yellow. Forget about objects and their names. Look at things like shape, value (dark/light), color, spatial relationships. And then decide where you want to take them; what you want to emphasize, shift in a certain direction, etc. Digital space is vastly more flexible in this sense than optical printing, but the latter certainly also offers certain possibilities for playing around (it just takes more time, more effort, more experience in getting anything done).

Getting your prints made at Blue Moon might give you better results, but it won't be because they work in a certain way - if the prints are better, it's just because the person doing the color balancing somehow leans closer to your preferences than whatever man or machine made the other prints. It'll still be a crap shoot. The only way out of it, is to take control.
 

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@DREW WILEY would say:

I personally always carry a light pink skylight filter for just a minor bit of correction, namely a "KN" Singh-Ray (apparently not made any more), then the 81A, which is the most versatile filter, and will correct the film for overcast drab bluish skies - a common situation. An 81B is just a little more pronounced in its degree of correction, but I've had trouble finding an 81B which is really correct itself - a true light balancing filter should have a pinch of pinkish amber to it, and not just dirty yellow. Then I carry an 81C for deep blue shade under clear blue skies - common in the mtns and coast, but really anywhere there's a mix of real blue overhead and deep shadows.

He would also say:

.. there are certain very important corrections which can ONLY be made at the time of exposure, which affect the way the different dye layers will act from that point onward. Playing around with overall balance in the darkroom afterwards merely corrects your paper or general look to the film itself, but inherently cannot remedy an incorrect initial exposure. Nor is it easy to do so in PS. With chromes, we just slapped em on a lightbox and either liked the shadows or didn't, but it certainly didn't mean the lack of color temp correction was warranted. Some people liked things all excessively blue. This kind of off-the-cuff strategy works very poorly with Ektar, which is not a muddy shoot-from-the-hip amateur color neg film, but something which behaves more like a BMW... It will really take you places, but it will also crash into a tree a lot faster if you're careless with it.
 

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Which means mixed lighting - blue shadows and yellow highlights. Ektar is both accurate and quite saturated, so the effects of mixed lighting are quite visible.
In other words, you are actually seeing how it actually is.

Quite true. Our brain often makes color corrections for us.
 
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Early morning or in the evening before dusk are what photographers call the "golden hour" .
There's a reason for this .
It looks like you were a bit to late to catch the colour in the sky .

Yes, the sky had no clouds but looks washed out during “golden hour”…!
 

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Which means mixed lighting - blue shadows and yellow highlights. Ektar is both accurate and quite saturated, so the effects of mixed lighting are quite visible.
In other words, you are actually seeing how it actually is.

An example of blue shadows…!
 

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Both shots were taken with the pre AI Nikkor 35mm f/2 O.C…!
 

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Alex Benjamin

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Overexposing, as in the examples above, doesn't help. With Ektar 100, you need to nail the exposure right. It doesn't have the latitude a black & white film does, and it doesn't respond to over exposure as well as Portra. Neither does the colors respond well to underexposure, for that matter.

Range is also smaller. In scenes like yours, with that much contrast, you'll have to sacrifice the shadows.

I rarely use color film other than Ektar 100, but I find it almost as difficult to master as the Kodak E100 slide film. When I don't have a spotmeter with me, I always bracket, just to make sure.
 
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