Red 0787: Brighton!

Today's random film is Red 0787, a roll of Kodak MAX 400-8 dating from the winter of 2006-2007. This one seems to have rather grainy photos - yes, it's an ISO 400 film and fast films do tend to have more grain, but this seems worse than usual. I know Nikon scanners are known to suffer from some aliasing with film grain but here the same noise is present in the prints.

In some ways the grain adds to the charm of using film instead of digital. A lot of digitally-filmed big-budget films and TV shows actually have artificial film grain added in post-production!

( Photos! )

Winter, fading into Spring

Cross-posted to deviantArt


Scanning the last negative (Red 0787) I was struck by how I'd happened to take two photos of the same subject with almost exactly the same framing on two very different days. A bit of experimentation with Corel later and here's the result: winter fading into spring.

Other than resizing one photo to line up on the other (more or less - the two were taken at different angles and so an exact match isn't practical) and applying an alpha blend, these photos are straight off the film scanner, film grain and all.

Black 3657: Old Sarum

Don't ask me why I'm scanning another random film at Nik o'clock...

This time it's Black 3657, ostensibly a roll of Kodak Gold 200-7 but I'm actually using the Gold 200 Gen 2 preset (later ones give a blue cast to the scan). The VueScan generic setting loses a lot of shadow detail, and likewise with restore colours or restore fading. I've ranted before about trying to colour balance film - the other fun challenge is the response curve of film is decidedly non-linear and depends a lot on the particular chemistry used. And no-one appears to produce correction tables for anything remotely modern. On the plus side, being ISO 200 there's a lot less grain.

Another random aside: as well as adding artificial film grain, one can now get look-up tables designed to alter the colours of digital footage to match the characteristics of film.

( Enough ranting. Photos! )