bwcolor wrote:
Yes, low compared to Ektar100, Velvia and even the new Harmon color film(s). Apparent saturation is also influenced by what settings you used to scan or copy the negative. It’s pretty easy to go over to Flickr and use the search facility to view various film stocks interpreted through a myriad of scanning and copying equipment, settings and work flows. Of course, the downside is that many of the images posted or after editing and to the photographers preferences.
+1. Same experience here. Stopped using Porta because I was not a fan of the film's rendering independent on ISO. Actually, the cheaper Kodak Gold is better IMO for even saturation including portrait photos. Ektar 100 is the most saturated Kodak color negative film but comes with the debit of purple shadows and too reddish looking faces when doing portraiture.
My lab has a Noritsu and a Frontier; I much prefer the Noritsu scans when I shoot Portra but for some reason they always use the Frontier on Portra 160 (and use the Noritsu for Portra 400 and 800). I find the Frontier scans to look colder with a blue-green cast (typical of Fuji) and I always warm them up and adjust colours in post. I have a roll of Portra 160 in the fridge and will ask them to use the Noritsu when they scan it. I only order the regular resolution jpeg files from them, no TIFFs, as in my experience the jpeg files are no less flexible for editing and a lot cheaper.
I sometimes rescan those negatives at home (and I scan all my B&W films since I develop those at home) and I almost always save them as jpeg before I edit them; I scan the negatives as TIFFs but I've never seen much different between the two in terms of image quality and flexibility in the final edited files so I use the TIFFs for archiving but do all my editing on jpegs.
The film color profile makes all the difference in a good color negative conversion. Additionally, everything effects that profile - lighting color, exposure, development variables, scanning method, lens coatings etc. Virtually all labs must let their scanners automatically determine the profile or they would never finish their work. If a lab is giving yours individual attention that is a rare thing, but still won't guarantee good output. The best profiles I have experienced come in a Lightroom plugin called Negative Lab Pro. I'm sure I would still have a full head of hair if I had the NLP tool 30 years ago - sadly there ain't much hair left now...
Okay, I have to ask a stupid question. It's all about terminology. When you say "low saturation" what exactly do you mean? Does it mean, as I guess, that the film does not saturate or is hard to saturate, so that colors are softer, muted? Or could it mean that the film has a low saturation point so that it saturates quickly, hence producing more, um, lively, more monochromatic colors? Those meaning are exactly opposite.
To my eyes those Portra pics above look very pastel and subtle, as if at any reasonably correct exposure the colors are not burned in, so to speak.
I would think that of course the scanning and post processing has a bigger effect than the film itself. You get a "raw" negative then scan it. The scanning process itself, then base color removal and anything else you do with brightness and contrast can change the end result.
