WOW! "New" Kodak Portra 400...

I shot two rolls of the new Portra 400 35mm at the weekend, but at stock ISO 400 so that will be interesting to see how that turns out.

I shot the last two frames at night, long exposures with an 80A filter so again, an interesting test that I will follow up with some results at the weekend.

Vicky
 
This looked great, until checking out the lab he uses, starting development is $20, with extra for push/pull, ends up at about 5x Costco price, with same size scans.
 
ampguy said:
This looked great, until checking out the lab he uses, starting development is $20, with extra for push/pull, ends up at about 5x Costco price, with same size scans.
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$20 is for process, proof and scan. Regular development starts at $8. Nothing out of the ordinary if you ask me. Besides, the benefits of Portra 400 are not tied to that specific lab.
 
right

right

Costco also proofs and scans ~4MB, and proofs are kinda ink jetted on the cd/dvd 😉 so it's still $5 vs $20+ (they charge extra for the push/pull - $1 per stop).

I understand that the push isn't limited to this lab, but it is to a lab that doesn't use a minilab fixed time in/out machine, right?

I mean what would you do with the minilab machine, put it on a variac and slow down the process?? 😉

You've got to dip and dunk I think.

Jamie123 said:
$20 is for process, proof and scan. Regular development starts at $8. Nothing out of the ordinary if you ask me. Besides, the benefits of Portra 400 are not tied to that specific lab.
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ampguy said:
Costco also proofs and scans ~4MB
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You get what you pay for... I used Costco for years for develop-only, and they were okay. But it's a lot nicer using a real lab (Phoenix) that has no problem pushing and pulling. Develop-only is $7, the turnaround is faster, and you're dealing with professionals.

As for minilab scans... The quality is so rough that you really can't tell anything about the actual negative. I believe the "scan" is captured with an internal digital camera rather than a scanner, and then everything is run through Noritsu's black box image processing, where god-knows-what happens. Then they use that twisted file to make the print. No thanks...
 
The lab I use in Tempe Az tells me that you can't push C41 isn't Portra c41? I do understand you can shoot underexposed 1 stop and since it's very forgiving you still get good negatives. I've done this and was satisfied with them. So can you push C41? Maybe my lab doesn't have the right equipment.
 
You can

You can

The film vendors provide data for it, at least for a couple of EV pushes.

However, not sure you can do with a minilab/automated C41 processor that may be pre-timed for a 14 or so minute dev cycle. Maybe advanced ones can with the right settings.

May have to manually open the can and spool on a reel and develop.

jcrutcher said:
The lab I use in Tempe Az tells me that you can't push C41 isn't Portra c41? I do understand you can shoot underexposed 1 stop and since it's very forgiving you still get good negatives. I've done this and was satisfied with them. So can you push C41? Maybe my lab doesn't have the right equipment.
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I just got my first set of budget scans back from North Coast Photo. For this "workflow," the underexposure latitude is as impressive as others have noted in various blog posts (Figital Revolution, Twin Lens Life, etc.)

I shot using aperture priority and my Hexar set to 1600 ASA and the results were quite pleasing. I'm pretty excited to have the flexibility to shoot anywhere from 400 to 1600 on the same roll of film. Just like digital 🙂
 
Interesting. So, from an image quality standpoint, is it better to underexpose and develop normally or do the full push processing (i.e., underexpose and over-process)?
 
You can push it as much as you want, in a pro lab or at home, but you won't get a real gain in speed above half a stop: you'll get a bump in contrast, though... Color negative needs the light it needs to give its best tone, no matter the development... Below its box speed incident metered, it starts to show grain and shadows problems.

Cheers,

Juan
 
Juan,

Thanks for chiming in. I'm not questioning your statement as much as trying to understand it. If you can only gain about 1/2 stop in speed by push processing, wouldn't that mean that if you were underexposing by two stops and then developing at push +2, your shots would look about 1 1/2 stops underexposed? That doesn't seem to be the case with some of the examples I've seen online for film pushed 2 and even 3 stops. Am I misunderstanding something?

Thanks again

Juan Valdenebro said:
You can push it as much as you want, in a pro lab or at home, but you won't get a real gain in speed above half a stop: you'll get a bump in contrast, though... Color negative needs the light it needs to give its best tone, no matter the development... Below its box speed incident metered, it starts to show grain and shadows problems.

Cheers,

Juan
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Too much depends on 'true speed'. ISO speed depends on a given shadow density at a given contrast. You can bump up that shadow density to quite an extent, but always at the expense of more contrast. A low-contrast subject with a 2-stop push may look fine; a contrasty subject may push the limits of the film at normal exposure (not likely with this film).

Cheers,

R.
 
jcrutcher said:
The lab I use in Tempe Az tells me that you can't push C41 isn't Portra c41? I do understand you can shoot underexposed 1 stop and since it's very forgiving you still get good negatives. I've done this and was satisfied with them. So can you push C41? Maybe my lab doesn't have the right equipment.
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Sounds like the person in the lab is either clueless, or they have the wrong equipment. C41 can indeed be pushed.

Most of my work has been with Fuji Pro400H. I rate at 160, and meter for the shadows on skin. I get fine grain & great color. From the Portra 400 I've used in 120, I can't really say the grain is noticeably more fine. Also, with overexposure, I find Portra becomes a bit warmer than the Fuji stock.

Canlas, Riccis and the Wright Brothers use a tremendous amount of different film stocks. Like them, I have all my weddings and portrait sessions processed and scanned by Richard Photo Lab. Their results are superb....and there is a reason why they are considered one of the premier labs for wedding photographers and portrait photographers.
 
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v_roma said:
Juan,
Thanks for chiming in. I'm not questioning your statement as much as trying to understand it. If you can only gain about 1/2 stop in speed by push processing, wouldn't that mean that if you were underexposing by two stops and then developing at push +2, your shots would look about 1 1/2 stops underexposed? That doesn't seem to be the case with some of the examples I've seen online for film pushed 2 and even 3 stops. Am I misunderstanding something?
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As I understand it, pushing (extending development) really comes into play when wet printing. Sure it might give you a bit of extra real speed, and it can affect grain some, but if you've got a 2 stop underexposed negative, when it comes time to print and you want your highlights the appropriate tone, the shadows will be a murky gray. So you want to increase your contrast of the print. In the darkroom, you only have so much control there with VC papers, grades, etc. Alternately, you can push process your film, which drives midtones and highlights up higher on the scale and increases contrast. Now you can print your negative at grade 2 like your other normal negatives.

With scanning, it's pretty easy to set black and white points, and the tonal scales in between, in Photoshop. So while there are some advantages to pushing in development (the aforementioned small speed boost, grain, effects, the ability to print in the darkroom, and getting it 'right' on the neg), if all you ever do is scan, you can do *most* of what you need to do in Photoshop. At least that's my opinion.

This is for B&W film. Color is similar except that when you push, each curve (RGB) can change differently, introducing color casts. And since almost all color nowadays is scanned, there is less worry about getting it right for printing. Though if you are wet printing, color paper grades are so limited now that you could be screwed with an underexposed but normally developed negative. I think. I've never printed color.

Here's a link to 3 examples. The first (tmz-800) is T-Max 3200 exposed at 800 and developed at 800. This example printed fine in the darkroom at grade 2. I didn't print the other two. The 2nd example (tmz-3200-push) the same film exposed at 3200 and push processed. The 3rd (tmz-3200-nopush) is the same film exposed at 3200 and processed as if it were 800. All three have curve corrections in Photoshop - more minimal for the first two. The 2nd two look remarkably similar - you could probably bring them even closer together with a bit more tweaking.
 
Tim Gray said:
As I understand it, pushing (extending development) really comes into play when wet printing. Sure it might give you a bit of extra real speed, and it can affect grain some, but if you've got a 2 stop underexposed negative, when it comes time to print and you want your highlights the appropriate tone, the shadows will be a murky gray. So you want to increase your contrast of the print. In the darkroom, you only have so much control there with VC papers, grades, etc. Alternately, you can push process your film, which drives midtones and highlights up higher on the scale and increases contrast. Now you can print your negative at grade 2 like your other normal negatives.

With scanning, it's pretty easy to set black and white points, and the tonal scales in between, in Photoshop. So while there are some advantages to pushing in development (the aforementioned small speed boost, grain, effects, the ability to print in the darkroom, and getting it 'right' on the neg), if all you ever do is scan, you can do *most* of what you need to do in Photoshop. At least that's my opinion.

This is for B&W film. Color is similar except that when you push, each curve (RGB) can change differently, introducing color casts. And since almost all color nowadays is scanned, there is less worry about getting it right for printing. Though if you are wet printing, color paper grades are so limited now that you could be screwed with an underexposed but normally developed negative. I think. I've never printed color.

Here's a link to 3 examples. The first (tmz-800) is T-Max 3200 exposed at 800 and developed at 800. This example printed fine in the darkroom at grade 2. I didn't print the other two. The 2nd example (tmz-3200-push) the same film exposed at 3200 and push processed. The 3rd (tmz-3200-nopush) is the same film exposed at 3200 and processed as if it were 800. All three have curve corrections in Photoshop - more minimal for the first two. The 2nd two look remarkably similar - you could probably bring them even closer together with a bit more tweaking.
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I think that there is good reason to be careful about assuming that we can underexpose/develop and fix the black and white points when scanning. Although that's a useable approach to a point, scanners are designed to work with high density slide film and scanning low density black and white or colour negative films doesn't really allow them to extract the full information from the image. If you consider that slide film typically has a contrast index at or above 1 and negative film may be developed to a CI of 0.55 to 0.65, then (making the big assumption that the film's characteristic curve is linear...) 10 stops of subject luminance range would equate to only 6 stops on film, which most scanners can easily resolve. Of course, on print, you need more informtion in the scan to reflect the scene luminance, but the low CI of neg film means this is very low level and requires very high accuracy (high bit depth) scanning to extract. If you have thin low contrast negs the problem gets harder I suspect. In addition, underexposure just pushes shadows to black (no density above film base and fog). My reading of an iso400 film with that much underexposure tolerance is that it must have a long shadow curve that would allow the extraction of detail deep into the shadows if given normal exposure. That's a bit like digital capture, but hopefully with plenty of highlight capacity as well.

On Portra 400, I liked 400NC and VC and have just shot my first 35mm roll of the new 40 Pro. Theprints from the minilab were really ugly and I didn't like how it scanned with the Portra settings in vuescan, but it is very beautiful scanned using Nikon scan as generic colour neg.I might put a couple up later.

Mike
 
v_roma said:
Juan,

Thanks for chiming in. I'm not questioning your statement as much as trying to understand it. If you can only gain about 1/2 stop in speed by push processing, wouldn't that mean that if you were underexposing by two stops and then developing at push +2, your shots would look about 1 1/2 stops underexposed? That doesn't seem to be the case with some of the examples I've seen online for film pushed 2 and even 3 stops. Am I misunderstanding something?

Thanks again
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Hi,

We must take a precise reference (one we can meter) to talk about real speed gain, and the one that's normally used is a medium value: say the medium gray card... If you meter incident at 400 using ISO400 color negative film, you can trust your highlights will be safe and your shadows clean and grain free, and if you include the gray card in your scene, it will be reproduced (as the rest of your medium values) correctly.

If you underexpose two stops (metering incident at 1600) and push 2 stops with longer development, you'll see a wild gain in your highlights, less gain in your white skins (but enough to make emergency pushing useful for white skin) and almost no gain in your medium values: your gray card will be darker than it is and darker than it was rendered after proper exposure. And your shadows (real shadows but also colored zones reaching their darker values) will suffer because you didn't give them the amount of light they required.

I've heard from lab experts (Q-certified Kodak Pro labs) that what they call a Push2 (twice a normal push) gives just 1/2 stop in real speed gain for medium values, but both highlights and shadows start to degrade.

For color negative, the best we can do is a)meter incident at box speed and shoot at perfect exposure when there's time for that, or b)meter in camera at an ISO a bit lower than box speed (two thirds or one stop) say 200 or 250 to have room for those cases when the scene values were a bit high, making camera's meter go for a slight underexposure. If for normal scenes camera metered correctly and film is then a bit overexposed because of the high ISO setting, there's no problem at all, because color negative's latitude is prepared for overexposure a lot more than for underexposure...

So no matter the development, it's a bad idea to underexpose color negative film. Two more things: internet is full of people scanning anything in any way and adjusting curves digitally to post images saying "look how well this three stop push looks". And the second, few people meter well: the common thing is using a camera that meters reflected light, so who says "I metered at 1600" might believe it, but this is what happens: he used an in camera meter that typically exposes at +1 compared to an incident metering... With most of my cameras (but not all of them), the metering I get at 800 is the same reading I get at 400 from my incident meter... So the person wasn't metering at 1600 but at 800! AND: if the scene was a bit dark, maybe he wasn't even metering it at 800, but at 400!

No color negative film can be underexposed two stops and pushed with development to make it look fine. It just doesn't exist.

But one really nice thing is exposing correctly (incident at 400) AND asking for a push or push2 in the lab: cool contrast and color without grainy or muddy colors and shadows. That's very used for fashion. But few labs push color negative these days because it's not easy to slow down rollers speed to keep film for more seconds in the developer: it's hard to be precise and affect the whole roll in the same way...

Cheers,

Juan
 
Agreed. It's useable to a point. I personally wouldn't lose any sleep if I have a couple shots on a roll that are underexposed and not push processed. If I shot a whole roll 2 stops underexposed, it'd be worth an extra $2.50 to get it pushed by the lab or the extra couple mins to push it myself.

The general idea of manipulating characteristic curve through pushing can easily be applied to curves in Photoshop. However, I do agree that the most optimal results are usually delivered by development that complements the exposure - push when you underexpose.

Lastly, of course underexposure pushes the shadows to black. Normal development or pushing doesn't change that very much.
 
Thanks everyone for the explanations. I guess I need to try for myself and see whether or not I like/can live with results. I just wanted to get a sense of what to expect (which I did) before blowing through a roll. I'm hoping the results are good enough to allow me to shoot in "available darkness" while I save for a faster lens 🙂
 
Just to say bensyverson noritsu scanners are seemingly developed to scan fast and at a base dpi to output at the set print size selected on the channel e.g. 325dpi @6x4, unless you tweak the output channel correctly most of its scans are quite bad.

and unless your running with DICE off then the noise reduction is quite poor and so muddys the image once more, in the end its mainly for high speed capture for print size up to 10x8 max from a 35mm neg, and it is indeed a scanner not a camera as such.

ampguy, the auto processors can push but basically its done by , switching the film advance motor off and ignoring the fault alarm then waiting with a stop watch then starting it up again when the correct time has passed, a very basic and not to accurate process.

(this is all as far as i can understand from the noritsu's i use anyway)
 
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