Kodak Ektar 100 is Great for Scanning

Went on vacation to the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico and shot three rolls of ektar 100. Simply amazing film. Colors look great to me off the scans from CVS. I didn't even bother to rescan any of them myself at home. Blues, reds, greens, skin tones, skys, all look pretty great to me. And everything super sharp and grain free. Its the best film I have ever used in 35mm. Here are some:
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:
and about 55 more: click here.
 
I can't say enough good things about this film. It seems like a lot of people are shooting it, which is good!

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Can you guys kindly share the Vuescan workflow for Ektar 100 [35mm] ?

My colours are a bit off the mark. Not as vibrant I see them on print and on this thread.
 
All of my shot with the Olympus XA during my visit to New Zealand - check out my Flick gallery were shot with Ektar 100. Unfortunately many frames were badly scratched what often required quite some post processing. I think that it will be my choice for similar trips in the future too (though I plan to have a large format loaded with slide film along too)
 
Here's one taken a few weeks back on 120. Rolleiflex 6006, 80mm Planar. Silverfast software using the Ektar 100 profile. The flesh tones can be very warm if you want. I purposely toned down the saturation on this pic.

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Jim B.
 
Scanned rollfilm (645) with Epson 4990, vuescan & some tweaking in photoshop:

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And yes, ektar can give some strange colours, but this was a pink scooter:
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Dirk
 
Great pictures here ! I do love Ektar :)

Ben, thanks for the ColorPerfect Tutorial (I didn't know about the L/G setting) !

Colorperfect is really a great software. Midtones are amazing. Rendition is not perfect colorwise, but very good , and better than any scanning method I've tried. To get a better color rendition, I have found that using the analog gain in my scanner device (Nikon coolscan) to substract the film base color was very effective.
 
That reminds me to order some more. I have yet to try Ektar in 120 format.


Had some good times with it in Ireland
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Ektar is a great film with enormous latitude, but it requires some thought in post-processing:

Picture after PP
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... and before PP:
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Here's a short description of what I did with the image:

After applying some perspective correction and a slight crop, I made several rather substantial post-processing steps:
  1. I boosted the shadows (while I masked out the sky, so that it would not blow out).
  2. The shadows had been illuminated by diffuse light - not from the sun, but from the blue sky. Thus the shadows had a heavy blue color cast which I compensated.
  3. Being underexposed, the shadows had a rather low color saturation (unlike with slide film), so I had to up color saturation.
  4. Also, the shadowed parts of the image had a rather low contrast, so I boosted image contrast in those areas as well.
  5. The image histogram did not span the entire width of the luminance axis, so I did an auto contrast enhancement, and checked the auto-selected values for color cast and contrast and tweaked them a little for a more realistic look.
Summary: Ektar is a very interesting base for scanning and subsequently editing images on a digital level. This negative film offers a wider contrast range than slide films, and therefore is an interesting medium for those of us who have come back to using film after having used digital cameras. However, it is important to note that this film is very sensitive to color shifts caused by differing illumination light temperatures, which often need to be corrected for a 'realistic' image rendering.

PS: Image was scanned in a Coolscan V ED at generic resolution (4000 dpi) using Nikon Scan, and processed in PTLens and Nikon Capture NX2.
 
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Anyone having trouble finding Ektar in shops? I used to be able to find it at two local places, but they no longer have it. One doesn't even list it on their website. I wanted to pick up a roll for the weekend, but that's out of the question now.
 
At the risk of being impolitic (well, when has that stopped me?), almost every picture shown in this thread has a cyan cast (or is still on the cold side after post-processing). This is the same thing I experienced with this film scanned with Frontier, an LS-8000, and a SprintScan 120. I used both Vuescan (many, many settings) and Silverfast. The only thing that ever really brought the colors right was Kodak's Digital ROC correction module. It is very reminiscent of one of the Vericolor films from the 1970s (5035 if I recall) that consistently scans blue (and that was how I got the idea to use ROC). It's possible that there are new profiles out, but I don't see any reason why this film should have been so far off the C-41 spectrum that some existing profile wouldn't work.



Is Ektar "easy" to scan? Yes, if your main criteria are grain and resistance to dust/scratches. Otherwise, this film is fairly unsatisfying (seriously lacks punch) and lacks the red bias that the original Ektars (and indeed, Kodachrome) had.* I know that some people are fascinated with the fact that this is a "new" film (really a reformulated cine film, right?) and that it has ultrafine grain, but if you want poor latitude with concommitant color shifts, you can get to that cheaper and easier with a digital point-and-shoot.
*Kodak told me over the phone on one of my many calls with them about this that Ektar 100 is also very sensitive to temperature - starting at 90 degrees and exposure for one day.​
The thing that makes my dissatisfaction with this film really acute is that the Supra films (later rebadged HD) had better latitude, better color, and only marginally more grain. Portra NC was great, too. Gold 100-6 was a fantastic film for scanning, though good luck finding it now.

Dante
 
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