What film has the best dynamic range ?

[DREW WILEY]

It's called Fujiflex Supergloss, and a number of outfits with big laser printers offer it.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Yeah, Helge, no need to argue about just how close to park a car to the edge of the cliff before things start getting dangerous. We both know what we're doing when it comes to tempting the limits. I personally often use the full ice skating rink right up to the edges when doing black and white work, which is why I love TMax films. But there are no hue reproductions implications to that, like in color film usage. Still, I've done my share of tightrope walking in color too.

 

[qqphot]

In the end while black & white and color film may capture as much as 12 f/stops or more, the papers at best can only produce 6 or 7 f/stops and it is always a tight squeeze. For that matter screens can only reproduce relatively few f/stops.

It's been interesting shifting to a workflow where I digitize b&w negatives using a sony digital camera with something like 14 stops of dynamic range. There's a lot more in the negatives than I was ever able to extract from them in the dargroom. Of course you still need to do work to bring all that range into what your chosen output media can deliver, be it any of a variety of papers, or for that matter, Instagram. But it's pretty nice to have it there to start with, because it's meant that I could do something decent with negatives that in that past I'd have given up on as basically unprintable.

 

[Helge]

It's been interesting shifting to a workflow where I digitize b&w negatives using a sony digital camera with something like 14 stops of dynamic range. There's a lot more in the negatives than I was ever able to extract from them in the dargroom. Of course you still need to do work to bring all that range into what your chosen output media can deliver, be it any of a variety of papers, or for that matter, Instagram. But it's pretty nice to have it there to start with, because it's meant that I could do something decent with negatives that in that past I'd have given up on as basically unprintable.

That’s the magic of camera scanning. You can grab much better quality images from photographing film than you would with the camera alone.
You don’t need 14 stops. The film has recorded 14 stops or more but what’s physically on the film doesn’t not need a 14 stop range.
That’s not to say that you can’t benefit from shooting different exposures of the same frame and merge them afterwards.
Especially slide film can benefit in the denser regions.
But negative too where the shadows often holds underdeveloped whispery thin information that gets bloomed and veiled away in normal exposures.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

What is the established or most used methods of defining a full stop of information?

I have no doubt that negative CN or B&W has more range than other methods of capture.
But we have to, if not compare apples to apples, then at least compare fruit to fruit.

The CMOS sensors that is usually measured that is, if we are going to be honest, what we are comparing against, always seems to have a very liberal definition of what a stop is.

By my definition, a stop is a doubling or halving the amount of light hitting the emulsion when making an image, so when I say 2-3 stops of over-exposure latitude, that means opening up the aperture or leaving the shutter open by that much more.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Well on a most votes basis it looks to be Portra 160 but with the occasional vote for 500T and Portra 800.

Is that a fair summary of things so far. I wasn't sure how to classify Adrian's nuances for the various films he mentioned

pentaxuser

The films I mentioned do actually capture more exposure than that, but the color isn't as accurate, and I think that's an important point to make, just because it hasn't shouldered over, doesn't mean you're good to go from a color accuracy perspective.

 

[Helge]

By my definition, a stop is a doubling or halving the amount of light hitting the emulsion when making an image, so when I say 2-3 stops of over-exposure latitude, that means opening up the aperture or leaving the shutter open by that much more.

The films I mentioned do actually capture more exposure than that, but the color isn't as accurate, and I think that's an important point to make, just because it hasn't shouldered over, doesn't mean you're good to go from a color accuracy perspective.

Exactly. The question is, what can be defined as a useable stop? Not just a question of what puts a mark on the film.

Of course for black and white it's purely a question of image forming capability, if we discount the small effect of filtering different colours at the intensity extremes.

For digital, colour fidelity also drops for the deep shadows and highlights, for physical and bayer array reasons. But as always the interpolation algorithms takes care and fills in the blanks.
Surely something similar can be done for scanned film? In the same way that a global long exposure colour cast can be corrected.
If we know the offset for a given emulsion it would be a matter of making a profile taking into account density/intensity.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Exactly. The question is, what can be defined as a useable stop? Not just a question of what puts a mark on the film.

Of course for black and white it's purely a question of image forming capability, if we discount the small effect of filtering different colours at the intensity extremes.

For digital, colour fidelity also drops for the deep shadows and highlights, for physical and bayer array reasons. But as always the interpolation algorithms takes care and fills in the blanks.
Surely something similar can be done for scanned film? In the same way that a global long exposure colour cast can be corrected.
If we know the offset for a given emulsion it would be a matter of making a profile taking into account density/intensity.

I found that setting black and white points (levels) using the histogram brings back 95% of the correct colors during a scan. I also found that using auto-levels with Epsonscan will clip somewhat. So I never use auto-levels preferring to set them manually. You could scan flat and set these levels in post and get similar results.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Exactly. The question is, what can be defined as a useable stop? Not just a question of what puts a mark on the film.

Of course for black and white it's purely a question of image forming capability, if we discount the small effect of filtering different colours at the intensity extremes.

For digital, colour fidelity also drops for the deep shadows and highlights, for physical and bayer array reasons. But as always the interpolation algorithms takes care and fills in the blanks.
Surely something similar can be done for scanned film? In the same way that a global long exposure colour cast can be corrected.
If we know the offset for a given emulsion it would be a matter of making a profile taking into account density/intensity.

Usable is relative. For some people, their definition is very rigid, for others very loose. For me in my environment, usable means the colors haven't started to shift. If all I have to do is pull the exposure slider down after inverting it and the colors are still the same as if it was given less exposure, then that's usable (for color negative film). If the colors have started to shift and I have to go do corrections, while I can still often get an acceptable image, I don't consider that usable because it's added time spent per image.

re offsets: little known piece of info, all of Kodaks modern color emulsions have almost exactly the same white balance offsets relative to the film base plus fog, so even though each emulsion has a unique set of offsets to get rid of the FB+F, after inversion, getting to a neutral white (white daylight with a WB card) is almost exactly the same for all of them.

Fuji films also behave similarly, though their post inversion offsets are different than kodaks.

so it's: multipliers to remove FB+F -> invert -> multipliers to get to neutral.

The multipliers to remove FB+F is unique for each emulsion and can be calculated by simply sampling the FB+F to remove it. The multipliers to get to neutral is the same for all currently produced kodak C-41 and Fuji has different multipliers, but basically the same for their own family. Older/other film has different ones that you have to dink around with to get correct.

 

[Jon Buffington]

Nice shot Jon. The soft look is very appealing.

I know this is a late reply but I wanted to say thank you for the kind remarks

 

[Rayt]

When I needed to shoot b/w under bright midday sun I alway used XP2. It performs well under such conditions. I use XP2 @200. I’ll post an example at the gallery.