Kodak / Fuji film emulation

[Nicolas Hanson]

Can someone please explain the main differences between the Fuji and Kodak stocks when it comes to film emulations? 

[Bruno Mansi]

Don't know much about modern film stocks, but I remember back in the days of film photography Kodak generally produced warmer results, with similar Fuji stock tending a little towards greener tones.

You could try going over to the Filmconvert web site, as they've produced plugins to emulate the look of various film stocks and have a number of tutorials/examples of their interpretation of different film emulsions.

[Abby Bader]

Agree, warm highlights have always been Kodak's thing. @Frank Wylie probably got something to add on this. 

[Frank Wylie]

As Bruno states, Kodak stocks tend toward the "warm" spectrum in color and Fuji is much more "neutral to cool". 

It can be very subtle, but a simplistic method would be to just reduce the reds across the RGB spectrum for Fuji and boost them a bit for Kodak.

Frank

[Frank Wylie]

Err, ah... that should have read, "across the spectrum"...

[Marc Wielage]

I'm not convinced the film LUTs really do anything than provided one person's idea of what the emulsion was. Bear in mind that what the stock looks like heavily depends on how it's developed and how it's scanned. I've seen specific pieces of film (even from the same project) look as much as 25% different because of developing and scanning problems. Even different batches of the same negative stock can look different. This is a moving target. 

[Bruno Mansi]

2 hours ago, Marc Wielage said:

Bear in mind that what the stock looks like heavily depends on how it's developed and how it's scanned.

Most of us take the accuracy of today's digital cameras for granted, but in the world of photo-chemical photography, processing labs had to go to great pains to ensure consistent results, so I'm a bit surprised that Marc experienced variations as high as 25%.

I can only speak about still photography, but in the late 1970's I worked as a technician in a school of photography, and we had daily checks on our processing baths. This would typically involve maintaining the temperature of our colour developers to within a quarter of a degree centigrade and running control strips through the developing process. These control strips would then be measured using a densitometer and the results used to determine how much replenisher was to be added to the baths. As Marc pointed out, this could be different for each process (eg. E6 or C41) or batch of emulsion from the same manufacturer. I'm sure cine film processing had it's own set of problems, as processing long lengths of film would likely mean the beginning of the roll would develop slightly differently to the end of the roll without some corrective action.

Just as an interesting side note, there was this rumour going around that people's eyesight would improve after spending around six months working full-time in colour developing labs. It was said that those suffering with age-related short sight (presbyopia) would benefit from the extended periods of working in total (or near-total) darkness. Never noticed any difference myself, but then I was young and had good vision at the time.

[Joseph Owens]

On 5/14/2017 at 11:50 PM, Marc Wielage said:

I've seen specific pieces of film (even from the same project) look as much as 25% different because of developing and scanning problems.

Gordon Willis wouldn't have been pleased.

As far as vision improving, my eyesight "improved" by almost a diopter after moving to a 23" HD monitor.

 

jPo, CSI

[Bruno Mansi]

14 minutes ago, Joseph Owens said:

As far as vision improving, my eyesight "improved" by almost a diopter after moving to a 23" HD monitor.

Just think how good your eyesight would be with this display..!

http://www.necdisplay.com/p/large-screen-displays/x981uhd-2

 

 

[Thomas Singh]

On 5/22/2017 at 8:18 PM, Joseph Owens said:

Gordon Willis wouldn't have been pleased.

 

Gordon Willis has stated that he maintained strict developing and printing control on every movie he shot. I can't imagine that the most acknowledged labs could get away with such sloppy work. That said, I use to develop and scan my favorite medium format still film (Fuji 400h) on several California based labs and I've experienced more than a handful of times that the exposure and chroma levels are out of control when scanned both on Noritsu and the famous Fuji Frontier. And that's happening even when they know I'm one of their most picky and detail oriented clients.

Edited May 23, 2017 by Thomas Singh