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

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.

loccdor said:

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

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Because it's really there!





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

George Mann said:

I shoot Ektachrome because I can't shoot Kodachrome.

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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.

koraks said:

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

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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.

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.

koraks said:

Because it's really there!

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

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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.

loccdor said:

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.

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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...

Truzi said:

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

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....for better or worse!

DF said:

"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?

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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.

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.

koraks said:

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.

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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.

perkeleellinen said:

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.

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

Samu said:

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

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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.

DREW WILEY said:

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.

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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.

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.

Chris - Kodak and Fuji engineers have no doubt done that kind of sensitometric thing many times over for their own sake. Whether or not any of it has been published or is somehow available to the general public is hard to say. But if one is comfortable reading the readily available dyes curves in the standard respective Tech Sheets, you've already got what you want. In terms of even more critical evaluation, actual eye inspection is always necessary; and that is how in fact they monitor the consistency of color quality control in the factory.

But that itself has lots of variables, including the accuracy of the lighting and how tightly the representative chrome has been exposed to spec (the target Kelvin temp even seems to differ, with Kodak's standard daylight officially being 5500K, but Fuji's somewhat different and warmer, namely somewhere around 5200K instead - that explains certain things). You could try asking Kodak directly.

Then you need an ideal professional viewing source, plus a fresh set of eyes not fatigued by staring at computer screen like I am now doing right now. And there is simply no substitute for a lot of experience doing this kind of thing. We get better at it over time, at least until eyesight itself begins to fail, or if there is some kind of abnormal color perception issue.

The kind of spectrophotometers I used were full spectrum, capable of producing actual nm graphs all the way from a step into ultraviolet,
clear through the visible spectrum, and a step the other direction, clear into IR. Ordinary film densitometers can't do that, but only measure RGB density points. In terms of specifics, everything keeps changing anyway. Provia I, II, and III were all a little different, as were the slightly different flavors of Vevia. Then there was Astia, the most evenly balanced chrome film line ever, along with its tungsten-balanced sister, CDU duplicating films; but there were even multiple generational tweaks of those. And as for Ektachrome, it has had its own evolution with a lot of variety and different hue biases, although the former end of the line product, E100G, seemed quite similar to current E100.

Then things start getting even more complicated when you try to figure out how these films themselves each "see" or not a specific type of color. For example, to the human eye, there is a lot of brilliant orange lichen on bare buckeye tree branches around here every winter; but that's based on fluorescent fungi which no current film fully or accurately responds to. Likewise, there are certain fabric dye colors which some films accurately see compared to us, but others don't. But the same kind of saturated hues in nature itself (according to our sight), like in wildflowers, might respond completely differently on some of the same films. Therefore, there is no substitute for a lot of experience with any given color film to understand what it really can or can't do well in our estimate.

I apologize for being slightly long-winded. But the only serious conclusion I can give you is that there is NO fully reliable objective "data" manner of instrumentally monitoring the precision of color. And I was once on a first name basis with the Chairman of the International Color Council, composed of the world's leading authorities, with some of them, including him, having at their disposal many millions or dollars worth of specialized instrumentation, and even more under design. Despite all of that still ongoing worldwide, color evaluation alway has been, and always will be distinctly SUBJECTIVE TOO, because that's how human eyes and brains actually work. All the big bucks color matchers at the manufacturing sources themselves still do it by eye. The fancy instruments mitigate eye fatigue, but are never competent for a hole in one.

Alan - digi cameras and especially digi outputs have hue limitation issues of their own, and also vary between one another. No difference in principle, just a different tool kit.

Alan Edward Klein said:

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.

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Yes, in principle. I was thinking more about camera phones, which are deliberately adjusted to give visually pleasing colour ... but there are many suggestions to use them for quantitative tasks (like melanoma detection). For those quantitative objective measurements, they need to be calibrated objectively.

What I was origially asking was: has there been any published study on the objective colour reproduction of Provia, Ektachrome and Velvia? It seems the answer is "no". I'm positive there was something decades ago comparing Kodachrome with other films, because that was an age where there was a lot of scientific activity on evaluating colour films. Those days are past and I suspect that few people have all the equipment and/or inclination to do a study. After all, as others point out, the real interest for most of us is subjective colour reproduction, i.e. incorporating the human visual system.

DREW WILEY said:

Chris - Kodak and Fuji engineers have no doubt done that kind of sensitometric thing many times over for their own sake. Whether or not any of it has been published or is somehow available to the general public is hard to say. But if one is comfortable reading the readily available dyes curves in the standard respective Tech Sheets, you've already got what you want. In terms of even more critical evaluation, actual eye inspection is always necessary; and that is how in fact they monitor the consistency of color quality control in the factory.

But that itself has lots of variables, including the accuracy of the lighting and how tightly the representative chrome has been exposed to spec (the target Kelvin temp even seems to differ, with Kodak's standard daylight officially being 5500K, but Fuji's somewhat different and warmer, namely somewhere around 5200K instead - that explains certain things). You could try asking Kodak directly.

Then you need an ideal professional viewing source, plus a fresh set of eyes not fatigued by staring at computer screen like I am now doing right now. And there is simply no substitute for a lot of experience doing this kind of thing. We get better at it over time, at least until eyesight itself begins to fail, or if there is some kind of abnormal color perception issue.

The kind of spectrophotometers I used were full spectrum, capable of producing actual nm graphs all the way from a step into ultraviolet,
clear through the visible spectrum, and a step the other direction, clear into IR. Ordinary film densitometers can't do that, but only measure RGB density points. In terms of specifics, everything keeps changing anyway. Provia I, II, and III were all a little different, as were the slightly different flavors of Vevia. Then there was Astia, the most evenly balanced chrome film line ever, along with its tungsten-balanced sister, CDU duplicating films; but there were even multiple generational tweaks of those. And as for Ektachrome, it has its own evolution with a lot of variety and different hue biases, although the former end of the line product, E100G, seemed quite similar to current E100.

Then things start getting even more complicated when you try to figure out how these films themselves each "see" or not a specific type of color. For example, to the human eye, there is a lot of brilliant orange lichen on bare buckeye tree branches around here every winter; but that's based on fluorescent fungi which no current film fully or accurately responds to. Likewise, there are certain fabric dye colors which some films accurately see compared to us, but others don't. But the same kind of saturated hues in nature itself (according to our sight), like in wildflowers, might respond completely differently on some of the same films. Therefore, there is no substitute for a lot of experience with any given color film to understand what it really can or can't do well in our estimate.

I apologize for being slightly long-winded. But the only serious conclusion I can give you is that there is NO fully reliable objective manner of
instrumentally monitoring the precision of color. And I was once on a first name basis with the Chairman of the International Color Convention, composed of the worlds leading authorities, with some of them, including him, having at their disposal many millions or dollars worth or specialized instrumentation, and even more under design. Depite all of that still ongoing worldwide, color evaluation alway has been, and always will be rather SUBJECTIVE TOO, because that's how human eyes and brains actually work. It you want the opinion of how bees actually see colors instead, ask them.

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Thanks, I'm aware of the points you make, especially about the number of variables.

ChrisGalway said:

For those quantitative objective measurements, they need to be calibrated objectively.

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No. It may help in some cases, but the reasoning goes the other way. The principle at work is that you take what's there and then make use of it. We're not going to color calibrate phones so we can use them for analytic purposes. We develop analytical tools that piggyback on the technical capabilities, which mostly derive from the primary purposes of a smartphone - entertainment and organization.

Moreover, these kinds of apps often (and increasingly) rely on AI tech that in turn relies on datasets that are largely generated with the same imperfect means, so the problem more or less cancels itself out. If you train AI on 100k tagged smartphone images of bits of skin, the app will recognize quite reliably the cancerous images fed to it even though the colors may range from green to purple.

As to film - I'm not aware of any application that uses film for color exact reproduction of analysis. It just has to look pleasing enough to the user. Which is true for 99.9% of the digital cameras as well.

The whole question is a moot point. That's why it's so difficult to find good data on it, esp film. It just doesn't matter. You like Ektachrome, you shoot Ektachrome. You don't like Ektachrome, ah heck, shoot Ektachrome anyway and run your favorite Snapseed filters over it.

Chris - color densitometers are potentially a thousand times more accurate than they were in the days of Kodachrome, but would never get used in relation to conventional color film anyway - enormous budget pharmaceutical and industrial applications, yes. For example, when my wife worked in Biotech about 20 yrs ago, she operated a 6 million dollar color spectrophotometer which could make out extremely fine differences in DNA strands just due to light transmission alone. It was such a trade secret technology that her work station and the instrument were behind a timed bank vault door, with six foot thick concrete wall all around that. The software was even more secret and secure. But at the current pace of technology, that itself probably seems Pleistocene by today's standards. When you're talking $40,000 per cc of solution, that kind of highly advanced gear can be justified; with the current state of camera film demand, it can't. And half the folks out there seem to simply want "fun film" anyway.

Sure, I'd like to see yet another tweak in the color response of the Ektar category of CN film; but as it is, I won't even be able to afford any more 8x10 sheets of it once my own freezer stash runs out. Likewise, a number of people are clamoring for a warmer version of Ektachrome with a response more similar to that of Provia. But back when they did make that kind of tweak, it certainly wasn't a home run seller for them. Today it would be hard to justify at all, especially since the only thing one needs to accomplish that transition is a simple warming filter over the lens.

The old specifically Kodachrome versus then extant Ekta 64 distinction in literature was mainly due to how a different approach had to be respectively taken when generating corrective masks for sake of ideal dye transfer print reproduction. I'm aware of the specific details, and have even spoken in person to certain people who were involved in those recommendations. Extreme instrumentation or color mapping theory had nothing to do with it; ordinary old-fashioned "visual densitometry" did. The whole point was obtaining purity of greens and reds at the same time, not the exact density of hue saturation, which could be easily tweaked during the matrix usage phase via simple pH changes to the transfer dyes.

Thank you Alan, Drew and koraks. The answer to my post #24 seems to be : there has been no published data comparing the objective colour reproduction of Ektachrome and Provia (and/or Velvia). Thanks for clarifying this and providing related comments.

As koraks remarks in #43, "The whole question is a moot point." ... but I was interested merely out of curiosity and my background.

As a student, on our Photographic Technology course at Regent Street Polytechnic (58 years ago!), we did a group project on the objective colour tone reproduction of Kodachrome, a huge undertaking involving all six of us, a calibrated sensitometer, Macbeth colour densitometer (all data taken by hand and graphs hand-drawn), a Macbeth colour chart and calibrated light sources. It took weeks. I can't remember anything about the results, but the act of just doing the experiment left a strong impression on me even after all this time! Doing this group project motivated me, a year later, to make measurements of the colour tristimulus values of my own eye using the Wright colorimeter (W D Wright's original colorimeter at Imperial College), introducing me to the world of visual perception.

ChrisGalway said:

The answer to my post #24 seems to be : there has been no published data comparing the objective colour reproduction of Ektachrome and Provia (and/or Velvia).

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The correct answer would be "those who have posted here so far are not aware of such published data." It may or may not be out there. I'm surprised on a daily basis of what's actually out there if you really look, which I haven't done.

I got awfully familiar with Provia too. Each generation had its own characteristic hue crossover shifts with pushed or pulled development,
for better or worse. I bought a lot of bargain out-of-date 8X10 Fuji film, 99% percent of which came out perfectly unless I deliberately tweaked the exposure and development for some special printing effect on Ciba, which I sometimes did. I hated the triacetate base because it was dimensionally unstable and lost pin register consistency. But that's all one could get for about a decade. When Kodak converted from E100S to E100G, stable polyester film base was available again, and life got easier. Then Fuji converted to PET base for sake of Astia 100F, the best duplicating sheet film ever.

Many subtle film differences are quite difficult to precisely render in print fashion unless you're quite experienced at it and a master at masking and so forth. And when film is scanned and outputted on inkjet, what you end up with is a lot more deliberate error than actually faithful color repro relative to the original. Inkjet just doesn't have the necessary gamut anyway. Back in the old days, expert practitioners could tweak the dye transfer steps and dyes themselves to match the original atop a light box, if they chose or were paid to do so. But more often that not, they took liberties to come up with a "more pleasing" image instead, just like we all often do.

I love the latest Ektachrome, I love Fujichrome films too. I've shot mostly Provia for the last 20 years. I've had really good results with the latest version of Ektachrome. Kinda tired of the availability thing with Fuji. So Ektachrome for me in 35mm and 120, can't afford color sheet film.

Gentlemen,
Speaking of specifics , can you suggest me what filters ( of these newer productions) I can use optimally with Ektachrome.
I've been photogafing all my life on Fuji (Astia my favorite, Provia and Velvia for landscape purposes) I've made my first 20 rolls and I'm having some kind of problem with the reception of these colors. It's more like getting used to the Provia than any apparent problems. I'm eager to experiment because 50 more rolls are waiting

The most common recommendation, and the one I use, is a Tiffen 812 filter. An 81A or 81B are also often recommended (81B is a bit stronger than an 81A). My understanding is that an 812 is close to an 81A but tweaked for more subjectively pleasing results at the cost of pure color accuracy.