drmike99 Loc: Fairfield Connecticut

I bought some from Taiwan in eBay. It’s ISO 100 and in date. It’s manufactured by Kodak in Rochester. The package implies the intended market is Mexico and South America and I’ve read also Asia and also read they’re planning to introduce it to Europe. The “Professional” heading implies it’s not intended as just another consumer film. I haven’t had time to try it yet (I have new Ektachrome to play with first and only so much time). Does anyone know much about it? Stock photo of package appended.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Did you try google?
https://www.dpreview.com/news/1785236641/kodak-alaris-brings-35mm-pro-image-100-film-to-europe

drmike99 Loc: Fairfield Connecticut

I’d read that before but it’s really not that enlightening.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Undoubtedly intended for sunny climates. : )

GoofyNewfie Loc: Kansas City

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burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

It's been around for a while. From what I can see, it's a tad snappier, punchier, and more saturated than Portra 160. The unexposed and undeveloped films are also a bit more stable under warmer conditions.

Personally, if I were going to use film, I'd use Portra 160 instead. It's the US favorite of most professional portrait photographers who still use film.

Bill P

In my film shooting days, I used a lot of Portra 160. I found it better for scanning than chromes, as it had a higher dynamic range, and was more forgiving in exposure in the camera. Never had it fail me. (but I did discover it worked better rated at an iso of around 100)

Bipod

Kodak has used the "Pro" designation for several different reason. Here, it may just denote the comparatively
slow ISO speed.

Sometimes it meant the film had a shorter shelf life than consumer films, or needed to be developed
soon after exposure. So just to be on the safe side, I'd store this film in a air-tight container in the freezer, and
develop the roll within a few days of exposing it. (Probably you already do that with all your film.)

People who never use slow film don't know what they're missing!

The following isn't relevant to color film but on B&W, reduced grain means you can get away
from using a silver solvent film developer (one that contains an agent that dissolves silver halides).
This includes developers containing a large amount of sodum sulfIte, such as Kodak D-76.
Non-silver-solvent developers give fewer blown highlights and retain more fine detail (but often
require the addition of a restrainer, such as potassium bromide, to preent fog).

Please let us know how you like the Pro Image 100 color negative film.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Most of Kodak’s portrait films after Vericolor II had to be overexposed by 1/3 to a full stop to have enough “snap and sparkle.”

With easily 2.5 stops overexposure latitude and almost 2 stops underexposure latitude, many pros relied on labs to fix their exposure errors.

I ran the digital departments of a professional school portrait lab for five years, 2000 to 2005, during the transition from film to digital capture. At one point, we had nine Kodak Bremson HR500 high speed, high resolution film scanners running 20 hours a day, six days a week.

90% of the film we scanned was Portra 160NC in 100’ unperforated rolls of 46 or 70mm width. In 13 weeks each Fall, we would scan over 5 million portrait negatives.

I was so happy to see us (and help us to) get off that addictive drug called film, I nearly went insane! Although I used film for 40 years, digital capture was like manna from heaven. I still think so.

Unfortunately for us, in time, it also meant the creation of a totally virtual imaging world of smartphones, social media sharing sites, email, and image messaging, where prints are practically useless. So there went our industry.

Bipod

There is a lot of wisdom about film in the above post:

All negative films need ample exposure to reach maximum black density.

2.5 stops over and 2 stops under exposure latitude sounds about right for portrait film.
(Of course, if one cares about how tones are represented, there is no exposure latitude.)

I totally believe that people who dropped their film off for processing relied on the lab
to fix there exposure mistakes--to the extent possible. What a tough job that must
have been for the lab technicians.

Finally, there is no question that digital can be a very convenient way to do image
capture. But what about prints? "Aye, there's the rub."

Photography is about photographs, right? And an image file is not a photograph:
it's a bucket of bits. Each viewer will see something different depending on his
monitor and color balance.

Just curious: what is "digital departments of a professional school portrait lab"?
Thanks!

BebuLamar

I never rely on the underexposure latitude of negative film.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

If you ever saw Kodak DP2 software (an enormous Microsoft SQL database and rendering engine that cost $20,000 per processor core to license), you would be amazed. It’s like Lightroom taken to a much higher power.

The HR500 scanners output 12-bit images that stayed 12-bits until rendered out to a printer. That’s what preserved the latitude.

We used DP2, driven by a “Wheelman” device, to adjust BRGB (brightness plus red green and blue color channels). It was, at first, a console with four rotary wheels that mimicked the controls of Kodak’s old PVAC film analyzers.

We had nine scanners and nine Wheelman stations with precisely calibrated, matched monitors tuned to our master printer. What we saw on screen was an extremely accurate preview of what came off the printer.

As Digital Products Area Manager, I ran Film Scanning, Color Correction, Quality Control, CD-ROM production (for school yearbook portraits and school office information system database images), Portrait Package Printing (15 Noritsu mini-Labs), Large Format Printing (two wide-format Epsons), School ID Card Printing (16 Fargo, Eltron, and Pebble plastic card thermal printers), Grade K-5 Class Composite Production, Custom Composite Production (for senior classes, bands, fraternities, sororities, etc.), plus high volume greeting card production system design and maintenance, Digital Memorybook Pre-Press Prep Technical Support, and Plain Paper School Services system design and technical support (for ID Cards, Photo Labels, Rotary file Cards, and Portrait Proofs, made on Canon color copiers driven with high speed RIPs).

It kept me out of trouble... I had a staff of 70 and four or five supervisors reporting to me.

Bill P

[quote=burkphoto]Most of Kodak’s portrait films after Vericolor II had to be overexposed by 1/3 to a full stop to have enough “snap and sparkle.”

Interesting. I found Vericolor II to require an extra stop to stop and a half at a minimum.

Bipod

I wish I could check out Kodak's DP2 software--it sounds great. I liked most of Kodak's technical products.

I absolutely agree on the importance of calibrated monitors. I use Spyder 2 device to calibrate my monitor.

Frankly, every photo processing software I've tried -- even the low-end ones--has been reasonably easy to use
and has worked. Just as cigarettes work: they are easy to light and smoke, and taste pretty good. The problem
is, you can't see what they are doing to your lungs. :-)

I't s not that PhotoShop and packages like it are broken or buggy--they aren't. It's that they take the image file
as raw material for creating something by "editing". But the image file isn't a draft of a document--
it's a image of an actual scene. The essence of a photograph (as opposed to, say, a painting or drawing)
is it's connection with its subject. It's an photographic image, not an artist's "impression".

On any LED/LCD monitor, it's impossible to see an image in the full resolution present in the image file.
Only is about half the stops of contrast are visible. So a change that wipes out a bunch of resolution or
contrastr will look *just fine* on the monitor.

The problem is that loss of information is cumulative. PhotoShop users run filter and filter after filer.
And the nice folks who make PhotoShop don't bother to label the filters with which ones lose information.

Knowing when you are losing information is crucial to all information processing.

Even if the case where the technology of the final print doesn't offer as much resolution or contrast as the monitor
can see, one has to be careful. Because it's easy not to noice on the monitor something that will be glaringly
obvious in a large print. It's there on the screen, but it's very small.

Big screens are available, but are expensive and for seeing the image as a whole, require one to sit back a long
way from the monitor. So they are not popular.

So my complaint with these software packages is that they are effective, but not ncessarily safe for your image.
They don't prominently display a message "Warning: this filter loses information" or "Warning:
the Sharpen filter creates bogus sharpness".

The sharpen filter in particular has ruined thousands of images and given people the idea that
defocus, camera shake, or unsharp lenses can be "fixed" in processing. That's no more true
for digital than it was for film.

Sure, if a customer complained that his B&W photos had been unsharp, we could develop his next roll
in a high-acutance developer such as Windsich Extreme Compensating Developer or POTA, with
intermittant agitation, and rely on adjacency effects to make the negative (and any print made from it)
look sharper. But it came at a price: low contrast, loss of gradiation, and creation of sharp edges
were there weren't any in the subject! So we didn't do that. We helped the customer to figure
out why his photos were unsharp, so he could take sharp photos.

The "sharpen" digital filter makes the same deal with the devil: you give up gradiation in order to
get (bogus) sharpness. But even worse, it's usually easy to spot when it's been used! Most users
of packages like PhotoShop don't know this. They think it's like color correction: if the image
is too red, you make it less red and you've fixed the problem---if it's unsharp, you run sharpen.

The "fix it in PhotoSlop" mentatlity has hurt photography. Not only by degrading images, but by
building up a tolarance for degraded and unnatural looking images (e.g., super-saturated color).
What one used to see only on dime store postcards now shows up in magazines, gallery shows,
and formuls like UHH.

PhotoShop (and packages like it) are quality, well-construcdted software. They are just aren't
good at tracking image quality. They need to carry a Surgeon General's Warning: "Use of
this product may be dangerous to your image quality."

It would not be diffiuclt to provide warnings to users about information-lossy filters
and unnatural-looking filters. An even bettter approarch would be to track the loss
of information from a given image as a %-age.

But adding this to the software would require a total attitude change -- analogous to the change
from Pictorialism (e.g., scribbling on the negative) to Straight Photography. IMHO, that is
unlikely to happen until the public becomes totally discussed with fake or fake-looking
"PhotoShopped" images. That might not be too far in the future--people are getting
fed up.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

That's close but it's not the whole story.

Professional film is intended to be ready for use soon after manufacture, exposed and developed expeditiously. In other words, it is "ripe" as soon as it comes from Kodak.

Amateur film is expected to sit on the shelf longer before it is used and it might stay in the camera longer partially exposed so it needs to be more stable.

Most of us would not see the difference but professional film is marginally better when used as intended.