Using daylight film under artificial lighting condition

[tkamiya]

I'm not sure if this question belongs in FILM section or SCAN section.... but here goes.

I will be trying color print film for the first time in decades. I'll likely try Portra 400 and 800. My question concerns color adjustment. I am aware these are daylight adjusted films. So if I'm going to be under florescent lighting, normally, color correction filter will be required.

But.... I plan to scan and print digitally. In such cases, do I still use filters? I could but in the environment I'll be in, exposure loss of 1 to 2 stops really hurts, so if I could, I'd rather not use filters and adjust digitally. Subjects will include people, so correct skin rendition is important.

I come from B&W only environment. Some help will be really helpful.
Thanks.

 

[jeffreyg]

I rarely use color but since the skin tones are critical correct color temperature of the lighting will make a difference. I do know that the different types of fluorescent bulbs give different lighting for example daylight bulbs will give a blue cast, warm white a pink to orange and cool white a green. The age of the bulbs and the lens covering the fixture also influence the quality of the light. A color temperature light meter and appropriate filters are probably not the way you want to go. My suggestion is to use strobes or flash for the dominant light source balanced for daylight film. Simple inexpensive flashes that you may already have can be arranged ahead of time or for that mater an on the camera unit and perhaps some auxiliary unit(s) will do the trick. A flash meter or through the lens metering or check for a phone app that is a flash meter. Flash might help with your exposure issue as well. Color correcting on the computer brings in a whole different set of variables. I would get the best results you can on film and just tweak digitally.

Hope this helps.

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[Joe Lipka]

Go old school. The tried and true method would be to make your first photograph with a grey card/color wedge or use a set of white balance cards (white, 18% grey and black). Once you scan the negatives you can correct to make the white pure white and the black, pure black. Then the rest of the colors will fall in place. No need to over-think this.

When you go hybrid the number of ways to solve your problems increases. You can use the best of both worlds.

 

[tkamiya]

Great idea. Gray card! I already have it so that's the way I'm going to go. Thank you.

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

With fluorescent lighting, be very careful of mixed lighting. If there's an incandescent lamp or natural light in the room, it's very hard to fix, so if you can't gel all the lighting to the same color temperature, turn off or shade the other light sources.

If it's important, run some tests, but personally, I find that I get more natural results (shadows consistent with midtones and highlights) correcting color up front, and then tweaking the scans if I have to, then trying to do all the correction in post. If you don't have enough light to use a filter, then you do what you can do in post.

 

[L Gebhardt]

You will get better results if you correct the light up front. If you want to do it in the scan you want to make sure you have enough light for each of the channels. This means adding a stop or two of exposure (funny, about as much as you would lose with the right filter). Then you risk over exposing the other channels. Since the curves will not be properly lined up you will have more work to correct the color balance in the scan.

 

[jd callow]

David and Mr Gebhardt are right on the money. I can only add that a denser neg as LG recommends will require a better scanner and that if possible scan raw and at multiple exposures. I would not recommend trying to fix the curves at the time of scanning, but instead do it in two steps, first in the raw conversion and then with the curves tool in PS. There are a lot of tools in raw conversion that can help mitigate issues, but w/o seeing the problems its hard to make a recommendation. The bottom line is that you want to keep a thick and robust histogram as you remove color cast. In the curve tool in PS you'll also want to avoid curve crossover where visible shadows go magenta or blue/cyan as you remove the green of the fluorescent or the yellow/red of the tungsten from the highlights and mids. One way to avoid this is to let your shadow detail go black.

 

[I.G.I.]

I'm not sure if this question belongs in FILM section or SCAN section.... but here goes.

I will be trying color print film for the first time in decades. I'll likely try Portra 400 and 800. My question concerns color adjustment. I am aware these are daylight adjusted films. So if I'm going to be under florescent lighting, normally, color correction filter will be required.

But.... I plan to scan and print digitally. In such cases, do I still use filters? I could but in the environment I'll be in, exposure loss of 1 to 2 stops really hurts, so if I could, I'd rather not use filters and adjust digitally. Subjects will include people, so correct skin rendition is important.

I come from B&W only environment. Some help will be really helpful.
Thanks.

Regardless of the mode of capture, digital or analogue, artificial lighting seriously affect the information captured/lost in the different channels. You may succeed to achieve visually balanced result during scanning and /or in PS, but you still will end up with noisy (poor data) results - WB or PS in digital affect only appearance; one can't start with poor data capture and end up with something bettered... I was convinced in filter use when after reading an article I tried - with a digital camera - the suggested blue filter for night photography. It was so much better that in fact there was no comparison with White Balancing. Filters are expensive, perhaps perceived as fickly, but if I was doing the shooting I will stick with them as the major correction; scanning/PS just for a minor touch up.

 

[pellicle]

Hi

To add to this I find that the blue channel will be the weakest (density highest over a narrow range) so personally I try to use a filter. Mixing fluro and tungsten (which can vary in temp too) is just asking for different colour casts within the image.

But it could be what your looking for.

I also agree with full range linear scans and do the fixing in Photoshop.

A sample of outdoor neg used indoor

 

[Zerofox79]

Hi,

I am working on an architectural project in which i am supposed to color correct the shots in different daylight tones according to the time of a day from early morning 4:00 Am to mid night. I searched on google for the appropriate references but didnt found much. Is there any sort of method either manually or auto i.e plugins or presets to achieve the best output according to the day time lighting cc.