Slide film or color negative - when scanned by minilab?

[Jon Warwick]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I use an M7. For color, I've always used slide film (Fuji Provia). Minilab scans via a Fuji Frontier are often pretty good, but they can at times look pretty grainy (normally when my exposure is slightly off) and a bit too contrasty in harsh light.

 

When the lab does B&W (Fuji Acros) using the same machine, less grain is apparent - a bit odd, given slide film like Provia presumably has finer grain than B&W.

 

This got me thinking ...... Are minilab scanners better at scanning negative film (rather than slide). If I tried color negative like Ektar / Portra, should I expect to get more reliable results than with Provia?

[Advertisement]

The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[NJH]

Honestly I think some of it is down to the sharpening they apply to the scans. The scans I get back from Portra 400 always seem to have this fuzzy bitty looking grain which looks the same at 100% whether I ask for 6MP scans or 30MP scans so I guess it must be as a result of digital sharpening. The 30MP scans I have had from Kodak Ektar looks less grainy and slightly higher resolving than Acros if that helps.

[adan]

When the lab does B&W (Fuji Acros) using the same machine, less grain is apparent - a bit odd, given slide film like Provia presumably has finer grain than B&W.

 

Nope - speed for speed, B&W usually has a grain advantage.

 

Look at it this way: Fuji Acros (or TMax 100 or Delta 100) is ISO 100 with panchromatic sensitivity.

 

Provia has to maintain the same overall sensitivity of 100 even when each layer is sensitized for only (more or less) 1/3rd of the spectrum (i.e. 1/3rd of the light). In effect, it has to be an ISO 200-400 film with built-in color-separation filters (with 2-stop filter factors).

 

So color film is generally more grainy than a pure B&W film of the same rated speed - it is technically a faster film, that gives up some of its speed through only being able to use part of the light.

 

(Same thing occurs digitally with the B&W M Monochrom compared to the M9 - the color Bayer filters of the M9 eat up a lot of the light, so the Monochrom is about as grainy/noisy at ISO 10000 as the M9 is at ISO 1600/2000.)

 

However, photochemists have worked a certain amount of magic in the past 20 years, using T-grains and chemical inhibitors and other techniques, that have improved things from the days when Ektachrome 64 was as grainy as Tri-X, and Kodachrome had to be ISO 25 to be as grain-free as ISO 50 Pan F.

 

But the tricks that improve grain, in either color or B&W film, can have drawbacks in tonality or color. Velvia and TMax 100 and Acros and Ektar 100 are as fine-grained as they come - but a lot of people don't like their tonality and color as much as results form the older-tech "fat-grain" films like FP4, Portra 160 or Provia 100.

 

So it is not just a question of negative vs. slide/diapositive, but also the underlying grain technology used.

 

However, negatives of all kinds do have one advantage - lower Dmax. A slide is designed to be a finished picture, and needs as black a black as possible to not look washed-out. Negatives are NOT the final picture, just a step along the way. They do not need to be (and should not be) opaque anywhere, and thus it is easier to push light through them than through a slide's deep shadows.

 

A really high-end (magazine-grade) scan from a slide takes a drum scanner, often with a contrast mask (a soft B&W negative sandwiched with the slide to hold back the highlights) while as much light as possible is forced through the dense shadows. Not something a mini-lab or desktop scanner can match easily.

 

Personally, I have been shooting some film again with a 6x6, and find that Ektar 100 and Tmax 100/400 are producing some of the best (sharpest, grain-free) scans I've ever made. They have their idiosyncracies - but I won't even think of touching slide film again.

[digbyhp]

Just personal experience from having used Fuji Frontier scans vs personal scanning on a Nikon LS9000 - I found Fuji colour scans very grain-free generally but high-contrast on negatives, but very, perhaps too, sharp. Personal scans on same negs had, often much richer tonality, not always as sharp, but I've learnt to become less obsessed with sharpness as the be-all-and-end-all. Sharpening did not often improve the image in a fundamental way.

B&W from Fuji Frontier was also pretty grain-free but had an odd tonality that wrongly turned me against FP4 for a while.

B&W scans on a LS9000 are very grainy, but a characteristic I like so not looking for a solution.

E6 scanning on LS9000 or Fuji produces good tonality, but strangely, less sharpness than I would prefer. Again, trying to get over the sharpness thing.

My advice - go to personal scanning. You will, for better or worse, have more control.

[xalo]

Adan's technical explanation covers most of it, but I think that acceptable E6 results can also be had without a drum scanner, depending on the image and the level of exigence.

 

Over the past ten years I've been using the same lab for E6 slide and C41 negative development, occasionally also b&w films between 100-1600 iso. The lab's fuji frontier scanners may have evolved over time, but in general, the E6 were the farthest away from my expectations. But slides have the big advantage of showing you very clearly what could be in the file: you immediately see a final image and can work towards it/deviate in post as you wish. With a desktop scanner that can be laborious (or sometimes even impossible), but very rewarding. It also helps to more restrictively edit and pre-select what to re-scan. The ease of editing and archiving are the key advantages of the lab's batch scans, I find. And sometimes all just works fine and you get a labscan that works really well with no or very little tweaking.

 

C-41 negatives seem to be a mixed bag, usually less grainy and more balanced than the slides, but the colours are necessarily an interpretation by the lab and (for me at least) difficult to relate in nuances to what the film recorded. Usually it seems to be close enough, but there is definitely another variable introduced in the chain. I also had bad surprises, like the quite grainy Portra 160 scans I got back; it made me wonder if some films are more prone to grain aliaising then others. Overall, the lab scan still does a better job with C-41 films than other types.

 

But I would not base my film choice on that, but on what you want to photograph under which conditions, how you want it to look photographed and how you want to see and use the image. A projected slide looks like nothing else.

 

Cheers,

Alexander

[NJH]

C-41 negatives seem to be a mixed bag, usually less grainy and more balanced than the slides, but the colours are necessarily an interpretation by the lab and (for me at least) difficult to relate in nuances to what the film recorded. Usually it seems to be close enough, but there is definitely another variable introduced in the chain. I also had bad surprises, like the quite grainy Portra 160 scans I got back; it made me wonder if some films are more prone to grain aliaising then others. Overall, the lab scan still does a better job with C-41 films than other types.

 

Same here with my labs scans of Portra 400. The colour is nice but I just don't like how the files look, they use a Noritsu scanner but I guess some of it is down to how they use it. They seem to give me as good and more pleasingly saturated colourful results using £1 per roll Agfa Vista which is a shock considering this is looking at 30MP scans. Its odd as Portra is supposed to be really great for scanning? I am reserving the stuff now purely for ISO 800 use where its a bit of a life saver for a film shooter.

[xalo]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Well, it could also simply be that you like the cheaper film's colour rendering better for the subject you photographed.

Based on scans, I was rarely happy for example with the portra series (mostly before the last portra 400) in a natural environment (read: greens, contrasts). The films were not really made for this, either — Fuji superia delivered much more natural colours.

The 'pro' films may have other advantages than colours alone, i.e. better tolerance to mixed lighting, badge consistency, longevity... theoretically also 'scannability'

 

Alexander

[NJH]

I think I agree with all of that.