Kodak Portra 400 and... whatever C-41 stuff my lab uses

I did a shoot about a month ago with a good friend. I shot half of it on PanF+ in 120 format, and also burned through a test roll of Kodak Portra 400 (the new stuff) to see how I liked it.

I don't develop my own C-41, but as I understand it, there's not anywhere near as much room for creative processing with color negative film as there is with B&W film, so I'm not too worried about it. From what I read, C-41 processing is very consistent between labs.

The new Portra comes in ISO 160, 400, and (rumor has it) 800. I liked the stuff I was seeing online, so I figured I'd try it out.

Unfortunately, I hit a wall when I scanned the negatives after I got them back from the lab. They were about 3 stops underexposed on my monitor. Any attempts to brighten them resulted in really muddy-looking images with lots of noise and emphasized grain. Kodak claims Portra 400 to be the finest-grain 400 speed color negative film ever, and it is designed specifically with scanning in mind, though optical prints can be made from it. So I was pretty disappointed, and basically filed the film away to sit for a while. I was convinced I had somehow messed up the exposure during shooting, though I couldn't figure out how I might have made such a mistake... my light meter was set correctly and my camera's shutter was calibrated well enough to give me accurate exposures when I used it for B&W film.

I finally brought the stuff into work (I work at a camera store that is also a photo and print lab) and put it through the high-end 35mm Noritsu film scanner there. It was as if nothing had ever been wrong. It looked pretty good; certainly better than I was achieving with my own feeble scanning efforts. Unfortunately, upon further examination at home, the images basically had all the same problems that I had seen from my own scanner... just toned down because the work scanner has a bunch of auto presets enabled that clean up 90% of problems on color film.

When I got home, I ran the stuff through my own scanner again and did some further testing with the settings. Finally, I achieved a decent result. I'm not entirely sure where the problem lies, but I'm still getting muddier and grainier negatives than I would like, or than I would expect. The white balance of the film is also way out of whack, which I have actually heard from another photographer who shoots WAY more film than I do.

The verdict: I'll shoot some 120 size and probably stick to the 160 for those days when I feel the need to shoot color film. For the forseeable future, I likely won't be buying any more 35mm Portra in any ISO. I'm just not that impressed, and it's pretty dang expensive, too. We'll see how the medium format does; I'm expecting it to perform much better.

Here are the scans:

At first glance, it looks okay. I'll give it points for having nice skin tones (which is pretty much the number one goal of Portra film) The color is actually quite pleasing in this shot. But it's not as warm as I would have expected. I thought that was maybe just a white balance error in the scanning, and maybe it was. But this photo was as corrected as far as I could go towards warm in Lightroom without making my model look like she was dying of cirrhosis, and it's still not that warm tone I was expecting out of Portra 400.

 

But as soon as you go inside, the yellow monster strikes. Again, I actually color corrected the above frame as well, this time dragging it WAY over into the blue end of things to get rid of the awful muddy yellow color cast that was on everything. And even after that, it was still pretty dang yellow. You can see that the shadows get pretty muddy and the grain is even noticeable on a 500 pixel wide image. And no, I was not using AWB on my scanner ;)

The 100% crops reveal way more grain than I'm aiming for (my tastes rarely call for grain... and even if they did, I would get it on purpose by push processing). It also reveals some really awesome scratches. I guess those can be removed without too much difficulty by using Digital ICE and stuff, but I like to leave the editing for the editor and the scanning for the scanner. Also I like my film to be not scratched, for the record.

Anyway. I'm pretty underwhelmed by the stuff. I've seen others use it and get great results. It's very possible I'm just doing something wrong. Maybe I scanned wrong (likely even), maybe I edited wrong, maybe I had bad light conditions (probably not though, let's be honest), maybe I even shot it wrong and somehow accidentally underexposed by 3 stops. Maybe Portra 400 in 35mm isn't my cup of tea. That's what I'm going with for now. I'll give it another shot someday.

I haven't given up on Portra entirely yet. We're going to give 160 a whirl in 6x7 format. Here's hoping for better results.

Edit: On a happier note, my Rodinal got here today. Way faster than I was expecting. I'm hoping to burn through a roll of Delta 100 tomorrow (not on portraits since I don't have the patience to set up and wait for a shoot before trying this stuff out) and get it developed and scanned. Also have some slightly longer-term plans to do some shoots with more Delta 100 in 35mm and in 6x7, as well as going through some rolls of PanF+ in 6x7.