Help With Ektar

robhooley167

robhooley167

Sir, my fingers are stuck together
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Rob
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Hi Gang

I shot my first roll of ektar last week and now that its been developed by peak imaging its time to scan. The scans ive done so far have come out looking very cold with very little saturation. Could this be down to a scanner problem (V500 with Vuescan), scanner operator problem or a development problem?

Will post some images shortly
Rob
 
This is straight out of the scanner, only been cropped and rotated

Scan-120302-0004.jpg
 
Hmm.. mine don't come out like that.. (not much use, I know)
 
Now you know why I went off it quickly! That will be a bit of underexposure, about half a stop causing the blue, actullay doesn't look too bad, should be correctable in PP.
 
I knew ektar wasnt very forgiving, but half a stop of latitude?! even velvia is more tolerant than that...
 
robhooley167 said:
I knew ektar wasnt very forgiving, but half a stop of latitude?! even velvia is more tolerant than that...
Click to expand...

Yeah would have thought at the very least a stop either way and it wouldn't look like that. did you get any prints done at the same time at all? Could even be the processing wasn't quite right.
 
It'll go down to about a stop and a half, but you will get a monochrome blue image!

Right I've had a play and I've managed to get this from the above:

Scan-120302-0004.jpg


It's not perfect, but PSP doesn't have very good white balance manipulation so I did it with curves. RGB massive drop in the mids, exponential curve style, and in the G channel a small bump in the lowmids/shadows and pretty mych straight above mid level up.

Quick tweak of the WB to try and neutralise the sky a bit and voila. As a starting point that's actually not a bad scan at all, I cold go further and make something very me from it, but as it's not my image I'll leave it at that for ya!
 
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Reminds me of Velvia 100f shot at dusk, daylight its fine, night its fine kinda, but at dusk it really takes on a lot of blue.
I wouldn't try to kill the blue in PP, I think you ought to try get colour balance a bit closer straight out of the scanner, you can't tell how much colour clipping there is, if its not in the scan you can't work with it.
Maybe let the scanner auto WB and see what that's like, assuming the negs aren't blue to start with...:)
 
Mmm, I've never had a problem with Ektar, although at the moment I get them scanned onto a disc by the developer. This was straight from the disc without any PS'ing.


North-Shore-LL by andysnapper1, on Flickr

Andy
 
It's a little less blue with epson scan compared to vuescan. I think i need to look at the colour balance settings in vuescan :( Thanks Freecom2 :)
 
It is a super blue cast. I'll back up Alan's underexposure claims too, it's one of the reasons I've never got on with Ektar. Under slightly and that garish blue tone appears, and over slightly and you can be faced with an equally garish yellow glow...

With regards to your scans, if you're editing in Photoshop (Lightroom might have the same thing, I don't know) then try this:

- Open a new Curves adjustment layer
- Select the "set grey point" eyedropper (the middle one)
jcw3

- Click on a point that is meant to be neutral grey in the image
jcwv


This should quite quickly solve any kind of issue with a cast or strange light temperatures etc:

hwizaf.jpg
 
Are you using the Ektar profile on vuescan? The one thats on there is meant for the old Ektar from about 15 years ago, and the series was notorious for having a blue bias (especially Ektar 25) so that might be the explanation for the cast. (Obviously if your not using the profiles then ignore what I just said)
 
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I tried a demo copy of the latest Vuescan which supposedly had an updated Ektar profile, but like Samual said it did come out with a colour cast.

I find with most C41 films that I have to create a profile for them, might be the same with the software your using.
 
For difficult scans I really would recommend making a linear positive scan and then using Colorperfect. The software has built in profiles for many types of film including Ektar.

I had a quick go using the JPEG and managed to get this:



I really can't do the software justice with just a JPEG but you get the idea. The sky looking awful is because I lazily spliced in the sky from your original scan to retain the highlights (otherwise the sky would match the rest!).
 
2nd colourperfect, makes colour correction really easy and loads quicker than Vuescan, which you will need to create the raw scans.
 
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Bit of a bump, I know, but I've been scanning some pics from a recent trip and yes, ektar blue is popping up. Fortunately I also shot some portra 160 (lovely stuff) and elite chrome, so all is not lost. Seriously thinking of getting rid of the ektar in the freezer and swapping it for portra 160 in 35mm and 400 in 120
 
Ektar seems very good at screwing with software, now I'm using Minolta's own Ektar's become a piece of the proverbial liquid. It's still an absolute arse for changing colour balance depending on exposure mind, starting to think permanent +2/3 and a cooling filter might be the way to go. I have also like you considered dropping it for slide film for colour and just using Ektar as a very fine grain B&W film in Caffenol.
 
Jakska said:
It is a super blue cast. I'll back up Alan's underexposure claims too, it's one of the reasons I've never got on with Ektar. Under slightly and that garish blue tone appears, and over slightly and you can be faced with an equally garish yellow glow...
Click to expand...

thanks for that. i've got some rolls of ektar, i'll be more careful now I know it's a sensitive one...


Alan Clogwyn said:
Ektar seems very good at screwing with software, now I'm using Minolta's own Ektar's become a piece of the proverbial liquid. It's still an absolute arse for changing colour balance depending on exposure mind, starting to think permanent +2/3 and a cooling filter might be the way to go. I have also like you considered dropping it for slide film for colour and just using Ektar as a very fine grain B&W film in Caffenol.
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interesting thoughts.

A bit off topic I know but do you have experience with portra 400 - is it more forgiving?
 
Never tried Portra, sorry. Looks just like nailed Ektar from what I've seen though, a tad less saturated.
 
For those using VueScan with Ektar, don't bother with VueScan profiles (current or not). I would simply calibrate each film for exposure and base colour (see here for details). I would not tweak WB in VueScan and rather leave it alone and do it in PP with curves.
 
trencheel303 said:
A bit off topic I know but do you have experience with portra 400 - is it more forgiving?
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Its very forgiving, you can underexpose up to about 2 - 3 stops with no/hardly any visible increase in grain and a slight bit more contrast and overexpose up to about 3 or more stops, its got a lot of latitude.
 
Perfect, that's all I wanted to know, thanks.
 
This is probably a daft question (I'm still faily new to using film)... but if the photo was underexposed, why does it look to be fairly correctly exposed? Is it the scanner's software brightening the negative by a stop or so?
 
Rod.F said:
This is probably a daft question (I'm still faily new to using film)... but if the photo was underexposed, why does it look to be fairly correctly exposed? Is it the scanner's software brightening the negative by a stop or so?
Click to expand...

Film has a characteristic called "latitude", where it can be exposed over a certain range of light levels and still come out with a result that we perceive as correct exposure. The type of film affects this though - B&W and C-41 colour negative film tends to have very wide latitude, in some cases 3+ stops which can be very useful if the wrong aperture was set/camera was malfunctioning, there is still a possibility of getting good results when developed. E6 colour slide film tends to have far less latitude, far less tolerant of incorrect exposure, sometimes by as little as half a stop.

And then you get some anomalies - Ektar, which is a C-41 negative film, seems to have quite a small amount of latitude.
 
Rod.F said:
This is probably a daft question (I'm still faily new to using film)... but if the photo was underexposed, why does it look to be fairly correctly exposed? Is it the scanner's software brightening the negative by a stop or so?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately with Ektar, once its underexposed more than about half a stop its colours start to go bluer and when overexposed it starts to go yellow-er and with even more saturated colours. Get the exposure right though and you get beautiful saturated pictures, its more like shooting slide film except you get a result if you mess the exposure up, the colours just go wrong.
 
Thanks, still trying to get my head around it. So with the example above, the film may have been underexposed (even by only half a stop or so) and, because of Ektar's small amount of latitude, that's enough for a blue cast to be left on the film. The photo might look correctly exposed but that might because of the scanner correcting the exposure a little, but the colour cast remains. I am right?
I only ask because I'm a newbie to film and use Ektar for long exposures, so I'm there's plenty of room for me messing up without the right know how.
 
Not quite, Ektar has quite a good exposure lattitude in terms of exposure, it's just that the colours change with any deviaton from perfect exposure. With C41 colour films you usually get a stop underexposure lattitude, just, and as many as 5-6stops of over exposure lattitude depending on the scanner. You are correct in that the exposure is compensated for during scanning, or during printing if you are able. (I suspect that with printing that the lattitude can be pushed further still, but that's just speculation on my part since it's not an art I dabble in.

It's actually quite handy using Ektar because the colour will quickly tell you how accurate your metering was!

Here's one from Cornwall, my Pentax LX threw a wobbler and jammed open, to clear it I set it to manual 1/2000 shutter speed and this was the resulting image! I can't remember the proper shutter speed, but it was almost certainly supposed to be slower than 1/60!

EKTAR00131.jpg
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
It's actually quite handy using Ektar because the colour will quickly tell you how accurate your metering was!
Click to expand...

Cheers. I've been sending my sheets away to be scanned (as I don't yet have a scanner) and I suspect they have been secretly colour correcting them too! Hopefully once I get a scanner, I can see how far off I am.
 
H'mm after reading this thread I'll stick to superia 200 and Reala....might try Portra sometime but it's more expensive.
 
excalibur2 said:
...might try Portra sometime but it's more expensive.
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But, IMHO it is the best colour negative film by far and well worth the small extra cost (y)
 
RaglanSurf said:
But, IMHO it is the best colour negative film by far and well worth the small extra cost (y)
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've been scanning a few different rolls of colour film over the last few weeks and I've been really impressed with Portra. It's just lovely stuff.
 
If anyone has any Ektar shots with a similar cast, or just can't get the colours right I can try and run them through my copy of colorperfect. It's by far the best solution I've found. Best results are had with linear scans. If anyone wants me to give it a go, let me know.
 
I'm surprised people are having issues with Ektar 100, it's just as forgiving as Portra in my experience but the colour palette is more saturated where Portra is more suited to portraits (hence the name).

I will admit it tends towards the blue when underexposed, but i've only seen that when i've really cocked up the exposure or done it on purpose, like 3 stops underexposed when using a box camera on a cloudy day. Even then it's pretty easy to correct when scanning, i just adjust the blue histogram channel in Epson Scan to remove any egregious blue, just like i have to do with the red channel and Velvia to get rid of red shadows.

Just switch to Portra if you can't get on with it, the colours are more natural but the film is more low contrast to make portraits more flattering. Though not to bad mouth Portra, i really like it as well as Ektar. Throw a CPL filter on it and you can add a bit more punch while keeping a natural look, http://www.flickr.com/photos/10456228@N00/5621683712/
 
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