Have You Been shooting With Ektachrome - Because You Can't Get Ahold Of Any Velvia?

[loccdor]

Many painters put a blue tinge into shadows on sunny days in their paintings. If it's done in the right amount, it can make the image more visually deep. Some of it depends on the feeling you want to invoke.

For portraits, I like warmth, generally. But I can imagine having a very serious-faced portrait where you'd want to emphasize the coldness. Just an example. My father has a very serious-mood painted portrait in his home which is entirely painted with blue, black, and white.

 

[koraks]

Many painters put a blue tinge into shadows on sunny days in their paintings.

Because it's really there!

These works all precede the advent of (practical, widespread) color photography. These guys were looking at color very intently!

 

[Milpool]

I shoot Ektachrome because I can't shoot Kodachrome.

Both great.

As for color rendering, I would guess the majority of people still using transparency film are scanning it so this can be fairly easily adjusted.

 

[MattKing]

There's a very powerful Photoshop-like engine continuously at work in our heads

And it is subscription free!
The other thing I would do if I was @DF is I would examine how I was viewing the final results.
If you are using something other than a halogen projection bulb in a projector, you aren't viewing the film in the environment it was intended to be viewed in.
Of course, that "in-head Photoshop" can deal with some of that as well.

 

[Truzi]

Years ago there was a similar discussion regarding Ektachrome and blue shadows. I believe it was a post by Drew that made me pay attention IRL.

We are quick to adjust visually, so I had to deliberately make quick glances to notice - but I did. Blue shadows everywhere. At first it was interesting because I never really noticed before, I just let my eyes and brain do their thing. Then it got annoying because I couldn't not notice it.

I'm much better now.

 

[loccdor]

Because it's really there!

These works all precede the advent of (practical, widespread) color photography. These guys were looking at color very intently!

Yes, it's certainly there, you can see it on digital cameras as well. In the images you posted, it's being emphasized especially.

Because the sky is blue. Shade is not being lit by the sun, but only by the blue sky.

Van Gogh was a remarkable painter, I think he must have had mild visual hallucinations going on in his brain all the time, but which were based on and drawing from things that actually existed.

 

[koraks]

Van Gogh was a remarkable painter, I think he must have had mild visual hallucinations going on in his brain all the time, but which were based on and drawing from things that actually existed.

Well, who knows; you're certainly not the first to suggest it. I personally suspect that the combination of being inspired by the bold color choices in Japanese woodblock prints and his admiration for people like Gauguin made him actually look differently (and more closely) at colors in reality. Note that his earlier work before he moved to Paris is often in a muted, mostly brown and ocher palette, quite sombre and dark. The same attention to details in how light played on his subjects was there, and no sign of any abnormal color interpretation. Anyway, we digress...and at the same time seem to agree on the color choices being based on what's really there. I might say...

Then it got annoying because I couldn't not notice it.

....for better or worse!

 

[perkeleellinen]

"I have a Moose Warm Polariser which I tried but it was too strong" -
Interesting - I've often wondered about those Moose Peterson 'warm' polarizers as compared to using regular polarizers. Do they really make that much of a difference? How would they perform with Ektachrome 100?

For me the issue was with how they warmed the clouds into strange hues. In the UK we often have large, fluffy white clouds and I hoped the polariser would make them stand out but it became unatural.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Point out, Chris, sure - I have the ability to do my own testing to the highest standards. I even had access to very expensive industrial spectrophotometers to double-check the accuracy of my own targets. In terms of the issue Koraks pointed out, the fact that color perception is as much psychological as it is physiological, I'm a highly trained color expert in my own right, who has taught and trained color matching pros. One has to understand how their own brain can trick them, which is why the basic rules of successive contrast and simultaneous contrast, and color proportion, need to be known by every serious painter or color photographer (get the well-known little color theory handbook by Johannes Itten).

My own color control work station is equipped with very highest quality lighting one can obtain, plus multiple other common light sources to check against metamerism, plus outdoor lighting of course too. My lightbox is exceptionally accurate in terms of true neutral
5000 K; few are unless you spend a lot of money.

The Impressionists scandalized everyone when they made sunny outdoor shadows blue - but that's the actual situation under a blue sky on a clear day! Photographic color reality isn't necessarily reality at all, but simply what we get accustomed to certain color films doing. We get used to the slight purplish warming of Provia, for example, and then find more correctly balanced Ektachrome 100 too cool by comparison. I'm speaking objectively. Which "look" one prefers is up to them. I've worked with all these films, and understand their respective hue biases, which every one of them has.

 

[Samu]

The problem here is not with the film - it's with how our visual system works. Shadows in daylight scenes are very, very blue - but we don't perceive them that way. For photographic systems, this brings a challenge. Either you optimize for reality, which means rendering shadows very blue - but people won't like it. The alternative is to try and somehow introduce some crossover so that lower values are artificially warmed - which from a technical viewpoint, 'breaks' the performance, but people will find the end result more pleasing.

There's a very powerful Photoshop-like engine continuously at work in our heads and dealing with this from a technical viewpoint is challenging. It's hard (arguably impossible) to get it right, as it boils down to shooting at a moving target.

This is very true. Many people are also used to the look popularized by Kodak´s consumer color negative films, that tend to be on the warm side, when balanced in optical printing for neutral gray. Slide film is of course more tricky in this sense, because you won´t be doing any color filtration or editing of any kind of the developed film, if projecting the slides. So. making a daylight color film, that looks good in all situations, is a very hard task. In the heyday of film, Fuji had a lot of slightly different reversal stocks, but in the current market situation, there is simply no market for 10 different color slide films. Ektachrome is a compromise, and it has also been made with motion picture in mind.

 

[Samu]

For me the issue was with how they warmed the clouds into strange hues. In the UK we often have large, fluffy white clouds and I hoped the polariser would make them stand out but it became unatural.

In the UK? I was almost sure you were Finnish because of your name, perkeleellinen.

 

[perkeleellinen]

In the UK? I was almost sure you were Finnish because of your name, perkeleellinen.

I lived in Finland around 25 years ago and when I first started to get online I used the word my friends and I used a lot back then.

 

[ChrisGalway]

Point out, Chris, sure - I have the ability to do my own testing to the highest standards. I even had access to very expensive industrial spectrophotometers to double-check the accuracy of my own targets. In terms of the issue Koraks pointed out, the fact that color perception is as much psychological as it is physiological, I'm a highly trained color expert in my own right, who has taught and trained color matching pros. One has to understand how their own brain can trick them, which is why the basic rules of successive contrast and simultaneous contrast, and color proportion, need to be known by every serious painter or color photographer (get the well-known little color theory handbook by Johannes Itten).

My own color control work station is equipped with very highest quality lighting one can obtain, plus multiple other common light sources to check against metamerism, plus outdoor lighting of course too. My lightbox is exceptionally accurate in terms of true neutral
5000 K; few are unless you spend a lot of money.

The Impressionists scandalized everyone when they made sunny outdoor shadows blue - but that's the actual situation under a blue sky on a clear day! Photographic color reality isn't necessarily reality at all, but simply what we get accustomed to certain color films doing. We get used to the slight purplish warming of Provia, for example, and then find more correctly balanced Ektachrome 100 too cool by comparison. I'm speaking objectively. Which "look" one prefers is up to them. I've worked with all these films, and understand their respective hue biases, which every one of them has.

I defer to your expert knowledge and experience (I used to teach this stuff myself a long time ago).

But my original question remains:

"but (can) you actually point to data that shows this? Presumably someone has done a properly controlled quantitative colour reproduction experiment to compare these two films (and Velvia)."

By data, I mean data, as in a technical/scientific publication or report. I'm not interested in the subjective impression of colour, I'm interested in knowing the objective colour reproduction of each film.

I do realise that objective colour reproduction is only of academic interest to our photography community, but in the world of digital measurements, for example for health monitoring of skin blemishes, objective accuracy is crucial as there may be no human looking at the images.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Chris woulsn't digitial cameras give more flexibility and accuracy than film in getting colors to be compliant to the experiment you're testing? they have white balance and adjustments to the the main colors you can set up before the picture is taken.