The future of colour analog photography is....

[sperera]

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

[Don Bryant]

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]

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.

[Don Bryant]

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/image...seCN200_GB.pdf

[bob carnie]

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

Then have a read about this my friend:

http://www.maco-photo.de/files/image...seCN200_GB.pdf

[Don Bryant]

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

[Don Bryant]

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/ishootf...4/?search=xpro

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

http://medienfrech.wordpress.com/200...ase-cn200-pro/

Don

[pschwart]

....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]

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]

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.....