burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Yep. The Kodak Encyclopedia of Photography had charts listing suggested filters for use with 3200K type B films, 3400K type A films, and daylight films. If you didn’t have $$$$ for a color temperature meter, you copied that chart, bought a lot of filters, and put them in the oversized filter compartment of your camera bag… Results were good enough for (local) government work…

I still have a shoebox full of color correction filters.

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

While I haven't had a nuthatch in my hand, could it be that there actually is a "bluish cast" to their cheek feathers or perhaps this is the result the cast from their blue gray back and wing feathers?

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

If you want a hybrid film/digital workflow, Negative Lab Pro Plug-in for Lightroom Classic is an EXCELLENT solution. It’s far easier to nail great color and tones with that duo than with any wet process I worked with in a lab.

NLP was the best $100 I ever spent on software.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Me too.

MJPerini

To answer your question about how slight tints were handled in the film days, In our studio we would buy film in all sizes in Bulk, and keep them refrigerated. We would do a standard set of indoor & outdoor test shots for each emulsion batch, along with filter recommendations to get it back to neutral. Our custom lab could also initiate small shifts in color, along with slight push or pull processing. And yes, the same film might provide slightly different results in Sun, Shade, or Strobe.
But testing allowed us to keep everything inn the ballpark.-----a good incident light meter also helped.

PS If You read about Jay Maisel who was the master of color, and used Kodachrome exclusively, he routinely shot -1/2, 0, +1/2 brackets

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Me too.

Whenever the mailman brought back slides, my wife and I would ‘play a game’ of “too light / too dark”.

alx Loc: NJ

Yes. Accurate precise temperature control was essential. Tolerances were best held to within .25 degrees.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Some of the major differences between wet chemical darkroom processes and digital, non-chemical processes are that we don't have:

> Temperature fluctuations

> Agitation variations due to personal technique (using small tanks) uneven nitrogen burst bubble distribution (using sink line/dip-and-dunk) or roller transport gear wear or voltage fluctuations/brownouts (long roll ciné processors)

> Chemical fluctuations (pH, specific gravity, exhaustion requiring replenishment...)

> Film and paper emulsion batch sensitivity variations (these got wilder than many folks realize!)

> Film and paper shipping and storage variations (heat, radiation, humidity...)

> Tar formation in processor tanks (lab scale high volume processing)

> Printer line voltage variations that affect tungsten-halogen lamp color temperature and brightness

> Printer calibration

> "Dichroic filter gear slop" (turn a CMY knob to .15 from zero and it might really be .17, but turn it from .30 to .15, and it might be .14)

We never saw color variations on our wide format Epson inkjet printers. NEVER. We could print the same file 18 months later, using Epson inks and papers, and the color would be spot-on. That was highly improbable with digital mini-labs using Kodak professional silver halide paper, lasers, and RA-4 chemistry. It was quite impossible with optical printers and long roll paper processors.

The color gamut, process stability, print longevity, and repeatability of digital production with inkjet output is far superior to silver halide. However, for volume printing of standard sizes up to 12" by 18", silver halide is dirt cheap, and much faster than inkjet!

frangeo Loc: Texas

Processing staff put the negs in a printing machine. They would see the images in color and make color filter changes as well as saturation and density corrections. ( Sorry to all those out there who claim PS corrections is not professional. the only difference is now YOU correct the image instead of a technician.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Using negative film is certainly different than using slide film. When I shot Kodachrome, nobody corrected the images. I either got them right in the camera, or ‘lived with’ the results.

After Kodachrome was hard to find, I shot several rolls of negative film using my usual -1/2, 0, +1/2 bracketing scheme, and {unlike Kodachrome, for which there was a clear best}, they all looked the same.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Being a chrome photographer really did teach one the discipline of proper metering and light management techniques. You had to be concerned about the color of the light source, and correct it at the camera with color correction filters. You had to use an incident meter or gray card and reflected light meter. You learned to filter flash with gels to make it match ambient sources, then filter the mix at the lens.

You can expose color negative films and rely on a lab to analyze them, hopefully with a calibrated video device. Most good negative films have a ± two stop exposure latitude.

Or, these days, film images can be evaluated and adjusted on a computer. I copy all my old film to digital camera raw files. Negatives and slides are copied with a macro lens, not a scanner, and the raw files are imported into Lightroom Classic. Negatives are converted and adjusted in Negative Lab Pro, a plug-in for LrC. Slides are adjusted in Lightroom with Camera Raw, the Develop Module. Output is to anything or anywhere. Web, book, print, video, email, text...

There is a LOT of information to be pulled from the shadows of Kodachromes. So long as the highlights are not blown, a slide can be made "acceptable" — in a digital image format — with as much as 1.33 stops of underexposure. Shadow recovery makes many images printable that would have been bird cage liners if printed via internegative film or Cibachrome or Ektaflex materials. I love adjusting raw files of film images.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

I use a true scanner to create *.tif images, but the concept is the same.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

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RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

I know Burk, that you haven't any interest in going back to shooting film yourself, but I wonder if you and some of the other "old filmster's" aren't missing a bet by not publishing some of that accumulated wisdom.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Check it out…

Camera Scanning.pdf opens in your favorite PDF reader.
Attached file:
(Download)