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Fuji Film is Blue!


JBA

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I just got back my first rolls of Velvia and Provia today and noticed that the color balance is very blue. I used to be virtually married to Kodachrome 64 and never experienced this problem. What can I do about this?

 

I've already tried warming up the color of this photo, but it still seems very blue.

 

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This one is better, but the areas in shadow seem very blue. These films seem to turn all incidental light blue.

 

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I don't think Fuji is blue, your second shot seems a little warm if anything.

Often E-6 can be a little cool in the shadows and in your second shot you can see cool shadows with warm highlights.

Colour temperature is a funny thing, human vision compensates for overly warm or cold light, that's why when we sit in a tungsten lit scene instead of the whites being yellow/red we see them auto corrected by our eyes.

The first shot seems a little cyan as if it was taken late afternoon, in years past film makers use to put a disclaimer:

Balanced for Daylight (5500K) one hour after sunrise to one hour before sunset.

 

So to avoid blue shadows, try a 81B filter.

 

Mark

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Can I ask who did the processing? (The UK Amateur Photographer magazine found various colour casts on the E6 processing of various labs they tried, including both yellow and blue!) Might be worth trying a different lab?

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Can I ask who did the processing? (The UK Amateur Photographer magazine found various colour casts on the E6 processing of various labs they tried, including both yellow and blue!) Might be worth trying a different lab?

 

A quick way to check for processing colour faults is to look through an unexposed piece of the film, leader or trailer, If you hold it up to the light the 'black' should be neutral, anything else shows poor processing. If you have a coulour densitometer you can measure it. Different casts in highloghts and shadows usually indicates cross curves (different density curves for the three emulsion layers) which is VERY poor processing.

 

Gerry

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The transparencies themselves look fine, fortunately, so I think the processing is good. The problem seems that the color wasn't balanced well when the lab transferred them to CD. Since I can't scan them again myself, what can I do in post processing to eliminate the areas that show a cyan cast without skewing the colors that are good?

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Hi JBA.

 

What are you using for PP?

If you're using Photoshoop one obvious but somewhat work-intensive answer is to mask and only apply color correction to the areas you're not happy with. On the other hand you might be able to pull some cyan out of the entire image without throwing things out of whack too badly. You'd have to try it. It would be relatively easy to try something like that in Lightroom, for example.

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JBA,

 

Here's your first image corrected a bit in Lightroom. All I did was boost the color temp. by +19. Didn't touch anything else. Looks like you have quite a bit of latitude to make adjustments.

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Hi Kent,

 

I do my initial tweaks in Picasa and then more sophisticated modifications in Photoshop. But "sophisticated" is a relative term, as my understanding of the program is still extremely limited.

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JBA,

 

Here's your first image corrected a bit in Lightroom. All I did was boost the color temp. by +19. Didn't touch anything else. Looks like you have quite a bit of latitude to make adjustments.

 

That's much better!

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If it is just the scans then a little PS white balance, in the following I just opened levels and took the middle (grey) eyedropper tool and sampled on the guys coat.

91295831.jpg

 

Might have gone a little too yellow, but the point being most image editors will get you the right results with a little effort

Mark

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Thanks, Mark. That's very close to how it appears on the slide.

 

I'll have a word with the guy who processes my film and transfers it to CD. There's just one guy at the lab who takes care of everything, and since I bring him at least three or four rolls a week, he should be amenable to some diplomatic feedback about the color balance.

 

Meanwhile, it's a relief to know it's not the processing that's at fault. I'll experiment in PS to learn to adjust the color temperature.

 

By the way, both the photos I posted were shot on Velvia.

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One other point: As a regular Fuji user (mostly Provia 100F, occasionally Velvia 50 and Provia 400F) I found that these films have a very neutral color balance (as opposed to Kodak, which appear to be 'warmer'), but tend to get blueish if underexposed. Even half an f-stop makes a visible difference, with the slightly less exposed shot being noticeably more blueish.

 

Andy

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Interesting thread. When I started taking photography very seriously in the mid-1970s the general understanding was that Fujichrome, as it was then, was great for blues while Kodachrome was the one for reds. And of course Kodak's Ektachrome leaned heavily towards the blues as well. Look through your old National Geographics and note the high percentage of (great) pictures that are a little heavy on the blue side - that's Ektachrome. The last transparency film I used was good ol' Fuji Sensia which I think still smacks of the old Fujichrome.

For what it's worth, I really like the colours of the first version of the guy on his bike. I wonder if rather than adjustiong colour temperature, a little less saturation and another half stop would be the way forward if you don't like its intensity.

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One other point: As a regular Fuji user (mostly Provia 100F, occasionally Velvia 50 and Provia 400F) I found that these films have a very neutral color balance (as opposed to Kodak, which appear to be 'warmer'), but tend to get blueish if underexposed.

 

I've found that the fuji films I've used (Provia, Astia, Sensia) all tend toward blue in shadow areas. Given that shadow areas are lit primarily in my area by blue sky this color cast is not too surprising, and is probably a more accurate representation of the lighting color. E100G produces more neutral shadow areas in the same conditions. Probably not as accurate but more appealing.

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